Dynamics of Molecular Collisions

"Dynamics of Molecular Collisions" by W. Miller is a astronomy book and space science reference focused on Cosmology. Best for students, researchers, and serious astronomy enthusiasts.

Topic: Cosmology

Author: W. Miller

Who this is for:

• Astronomy students
• Researchers and advanced hobbyists
• Readers exploring space science topics

Why this book matters: It matters because it helps readers build a stronger understanding of astronomy concepts, observations, and scientific ideas related to space.

Activity in any theoretical area is usually stimulated by new experimental techniques and the resulting opportunity of measuring phenomena that were previously inaccessible. Such has been the case in the area under consideration he re beginning about fifteen years aga when the possibility of studying chemical reactions in crossed molecular beams captured the imagination of physical chemists, for one could imagine investigating chemical kinetics at the same level of molecular detail that had previously been possible only in spectroscopic investigations of molecular stucture. This created an interest among chemists in scattering theory, the molecular level description of a bimolecular collision process. Many other new and also powerful experimental techniques have evolved to supplement the molecular be am method, and the resulting wealth of new information about chemical dynamics has generated the present intense activity in molecular collision theory. During the early years when chemists were first becoming acquainted with scattering theory, it was mainly a matter of reading the physics literature because scattering experiments have long been the staple of that field. It was natural to apply the approximations and models that had been developed for nuclear and elementary particle physics, and although some of them were useful in describing molecular collision phenomena, many were not.