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This first-edition text aims to give advanced
undergraduates a broad overview of reaction kinetics. It
begins with a review of the fundamentals of rate equations and
coefficients. The authors assume, at least implicitly, that
the reader has had some previous exposure to chemical
kinetics, so this initial review is brief. The first new material that
undergraduate students are likely to encounter is in
Chapter 2, which presents a fairly comprehensive overview of
experimental techniques used to study reaction kinetics in the
gas and liquid phases. The rest of the book is divided into
three sections. The first, Chapters 3 through 5, presents an
in-depth look at reaction kinetics and dynamics in the
gas phase. Rate theories for activated bimolecular reactions
are discussed at a relatively sophisticated level (although
the overview of variational transition state theory is
somewhat muddy) and are compared with experimental results. The
authors discuss both bulb methods and molecular beam
techniques for the experimental study of reaction dynamics
and show how experimental results can shed light on the
atomic-level mechanisms of elementary reactions. Unimolecular
reactions are treated within the context of RRKM theory,
and association reactions are touched on briefly.
The book's second section (Chapters 6 and 7)
examines, in less detail, the kinetics of elementary reactions in
solution and at surfaces. The third section (Chapters 8
through 11) considers systems of elementary reactions, including
chain reactions, explosions, and oscillatory reactions.
This section points out the importance of kinetics in studies
of combustion, polymerization, and atmospheric
chemistry, giving these chapters an applied flavor that nicely
complements the fundamental viewpoint of Chapters 3 through
7. The book concludes with a brief discussion of
photochemical kinetics in Chapter 12.
The book is well laid out and attractively typeset.
Each chapter features a number of shaded "boxes"
containing supplementary material or mathematical derivations
that can be omitted on a first reading (e.g., the mechanism
by which lasers operate, or the use of numerical methods
to integrate complex rate equations).
A large number of figures supplement the text. For
the most part, these are well-designed and easy to
understand; however, a few figures have defects that I hope will be
corrected in subsequent editions. For instance, a poorly
placed (and superfluous) legend rendered Figure 2.18 nearly
unintelligible to me on the first (and second!) reading. The
ordinate of Figure 11.2(b) is unlabeled, and the shaded
background of Figure 12.6 makes it hard to read.
One aspect of the book's design that I found
particularly appealing is the wealth of "study notes", which
are summaries of recent and ongoing research in reaction
kinetics and dynamics, and which include references to
journal articles that have appeared in the last 10 to 15 years.
A variety of topics are covered in these study notes,
ranging from the role of intramolecular vibrational energy
redistribution in RRKM theory to the photodissociation of
molecules embedded in clusters. The study notes convey
the sense that reaction kinetics is a thriving and
wide-ranging subfield of chemistry.
Of course, no first edition text is without its minor
errors. For instance, in-text citations of the references
listed at the end of each chapter are sometimes a bit sloppy.
Also, although partition functions are described in Chapter 3
as weighted sums of quantum states, the translational
partition function in Table 3.3 is not dimensionless, but has
units of volume.
My main substantive complaint is that the book
omits any discussion of gas phase ionmolecule reactions, or
other gas phase reactions which take place on barrierless
potential surfaces. Because of their importance in
interstellar chemistry, these reactions have been the focus of many
low-temperature experimental studies, and a variety of
elegant "capture" theories have been advanced to explain the
unusual kinetic behavior they exhibit.
The text would be suitable for use in a
survey-style course in chemical kinetics for advanced
undergraduates who have already taken a standard physical
chemistry course. A few homework problems accompany each
chapter. The text is written at a level somewhat below that of K.
J. Laidler's Chemical Kinetics, but instructors who
use Laidler's book in an introductory graduate-level course
may wish to consult the "study notes" provided by Pilling
and Seakins for hints on connecting Laidler's text to the
modern research literature.
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