Ian W M Smith - Böcker

Compiled to celebrate the centenary of the founding of the Faraday Society in 1903, this collection presents some of the key papers published in Faraday journals over the past one hundred years. The feature articles were all written by leaders in their field, including a number of Nobel Prize winners such as Lord George Porter and John Pople, and cover a breadth of topics demonstrating the wide range of scientific fields which the Faraday Society, and now the RSC Faraday Division, seek to promote. Topics include: Intermolecular Forces; Ultrafast Processes; Astrophysical Chemistry; Polymers; and Electrochemistry. Each article is accompanied by a commentary which puts it in context, describes its influence and shows how the field has developed since its publication. 100 Years of Physical Chemistry: A Collection of Landmark Papers will be welcomed by anyone interested in the historical development of physical chemistry, and will be a valued addition to any library shelf.

New, unexpected and largely unexplored physical phenomena occur in systems cooled to very low temperatures. The background temperature in the universe is approximately 2.7 K, but much lower temperatures have now been obtained in the laboratory. This book reviews the progress in a number of related fields in which the common themes are low temperatures and molecules, not atoms.This book brings together, for the first time, the results of recent research in areas ranging from the chemistry of cold interstellar clouds (10-20 K), through laboratory studies of the spectroscopy and kinetics of ions, radicals and molecules, to studies of molecules in liquid helium droplets, to attempts to create molecular (as distinct from atomic) Bose-Einstein condensates.The chapters fall into two parts, the first one dealing with low-temperature experiments and environments (ca. 1-20 K). In the context of this book, these chapters can be said to deal with relatively mature fields. The second part deals with very low temperatures and very cold molecules. Here, more emphasis is placed on the methods employed to generate samples of molecules at extremely low (<1 K) temperatures.

Eight further chapters address specific topics, encompassing basic theory and models, up-to-date research and an outlook on future work. Written and edited by international experts, this text is accessible for those entering the field of astrochemistry and astrobiology, while it still remains interesting for more experienced researchers.