The present monograph appears after the death of Professor V. N. Kondratiev, one of those scientists who have greatly contributed to the foundation of contem porary gas kinetics. The most fundamental idea of chemical kinetics, put for ward at the beginning of the twentieth century and connected with names such as W. Nernst, M. Bodenstein, N. N. Semenov, and C. N. Hinshelwood, was that the complex chemical reactions are in fact a manifestation of a set of simpler elementary reactions involving but a small number of species. V. N. Kondratiev was one of the first to adopt this idea and to start investigations on the elementary chemical reactions proper. These investigations revealed explicitly that every elementary reaction in turn consisted of many elementary events usually referred to as elementary processes. It took some time to realize that an elementary reaction, represented in a very simple way by a macroscopic kinetic equation, can be described on a microscopic level by a generalized Boltzmann equation. Neverheless, up to the middle of the twentieth century, gas kinetics was mainly concerned with the interpretation of complex chemical reactions via a set of elementary reactions. But later on, the situation changed drastically. First, the conditions for reducing microscopic cquations to macroscopic ones were clearly set up. These are essentially based on the fact that the small perturbations of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution are caused by the reaction proper."

The theory of atom-molecule collisions is one of the basic fields in chemi cal physics. Its most challenging part - the dynamics of chemical reactions - is as yet unresolved, but is developing very quickly. It is here a great help to have an analysis of those parts of collision theory which are already complete, a good example being the theory of atomic collisions in process es specific to chemical physics. It has long been observed that many notions of this theory can also be applied successfully to reactive and unreactive molecular collisions. More over, atomic collisions often represent a touchstone in testing approaches proposed for the solution of more complicated problems. Research on the theory of slow atomic collisions carried out at the Moscow Institute of Chemical Physics has been based on just these ideas. A general viewpoint concerning the setting up and representation of the theory came out of these studies, and appeared to be useful in studying complicated systems as well. It underlies the representation of the theory of slow atomic colli sions in this book."

Introduction 1 1. 2. Basic Concepts and Phenomenological Description 6 2.1. Separation of the Center-of-Mass Motion 8 2.2. Separation of Electronic and Nuclear Motions. Interaction Potentials (Potential-Energy Surfaces) 11 2.2.1. Heuristic Considerations 11 2.2.2. Born-Oppenheimer Separation. Adiabatic Approximation, 16 Present State of Potential-Energy-Burface 2.2.3. Calculations 23 2.3. Scattering Channels ~6 2.4. Classification of Elementary Processes. Microscopic Mechanism 27 D.ynamics of Atomic and Molecular Collisions: 3. Electronically Adiabatic Processes 32 Classical Approach 3.1. 33 Some Arguments for the Reliability of the Classical Approach 33 Atom-Atom Collisions. Elastic Scattering 34 Quasiclassical Treatment of Elementary Processes in Triatomic Systems: Inelastic and Reactive Scattering 44 IV Examples of Results of Trajectory Calculations 59 3.1.4. 64 Elements of Quantum-Mechanical Methods 3.2. Correspondence of Classical and Quantum 3.2.1. 64 Mechanical Theories Time-Dependent Scattering Theory 71 3.2.2. Stationary Scattering Theory 77 3.2.3. One-Dimensional Scattering 78 3.2.3.1 * Three-Dimensional Elastic Scattering 83 3.2.3.2. Rearrangement Scattering (Reactions) 85 3.2.3.3. Examples of Quantum-Mechanical Calculations 3.2.4.