Dynamics of Barrierless and Activated Chemical Reactions in a Dispersive Medium within the Fractional Diffusion Equation Approach

Seki, K and Bagchi, B and Tachiya, M (2008) Dynamics of Barrierless and Activated Chemical Reactions in a Dispersive Medium within the Fractional Diffusion Equation Approach. In: Journal of Physical Chemistry B, 112 (19). pp. 6107-6113.

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Abstract

Barrierless chemical reactions have often been modeled as a Brownian motion on a one-dimensional harmonic potential energy surface with a position-dependent reaction sink or window located near the minimum of the surface. This simple (but highly successful) description leads to a nonexponential survival probability only at small to intermediate times but exponential decay in the long-time limit. However, in several reactive events involving proteins and glasses, the reactions are found to exhibit a strongly nonexponential (power law) decay kinetics even in the long time. In order to address such reactions, here, we introduce a model of barrierless chemical reaction where the motion along the reaction coordinate sustains dispersive diffusion. A complete analytical solution of the model can be obtained only in the frequency domain, but an asymptotic solution is obtained in the limit of long time. In this case, the asymptotic long-time decay of the survival probability is a power law of the Mittag−Leffler functional form. When the barrier height is increased, the decay of the survival probability still remains nonexponential, in contrast to the ordinary Brownian motion case where the rate is given by the Smoluchowski limit of the well-known Kramers' expression. Interestingly, the reaction under dispersive diffusion is shown to exhibit strong dependence on the initial state of the system, thus predicting a strong dependence on the excitation wavelength for photoisomerization reactions in a dispersive medium. The theory also predicts a fractional viscosity dependence of the rate, which is often observed in the reactions occurring in complex environments.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Journal of Physical Chemistry B
Publisher:	American Chemical Society
Additional Information:	Copyright of this article belongs to American Chemical Society.
Department/Centre:	Division of Chemical Sciences > Solid State & Structural Chemistry Unit
Date Deposited:	04 Jun 2010 06:14
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 05:56
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/26171

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