* Astronomy

Understanding Reactivity at Very Low Temperatures: The Reactions of Oxygen Atoms with Alkenes

A detailed understanding of key chemical reactions that take place in interstellar space has been provided by groundbreaking research at two U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories and two European universities.
Argonne National Laboratory senior chemist Stephen Klippenstein along with colleagues at Sandia National Laboratories; the Institute of Physics, University of Rennes, France; and the University of Cambridge, U.K. has developed a detailed understanding of the dynamics of reactions between neutral radicals and neutral molecules, known as neutral-neutral reactions, at temperatures as low as 20 Kelvin, approximately the temperature of interstellar space.
In their work, Klippenstein and his collaborators determined why certain molecules reacted rapidly even at low temperatures by carefully comparing theory and experiment for a sample class of reactions (O3P + alkenes) that spans the range from non-reactive to highly reactive. The observed results from the experiment closely correlated with theoretical predictions.

Read more

Read more (subscription)