Chemistry is a field that is constantly evolving, with new discoveries and innovations being made every day. Recently, a team of chemists at the University of Toronto has made a groundbreaking discovery that challenges a 90-year-old theoretical model of the behavior of the “transition state” in chemical reactions. This discovery, which they have named “knock-on chemistry,” opens up a new area of research and has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of chemical reactions.
The discovery of knock-on chemistry was made by studying collisions obtained by launching a fluorine atom at the center of a fluoromethyl molecule. The researchers found that instead of the transition state at the top of the energy barrier lasting for a significant amount of time, it only lasted for a very short period of time, approximately a million-millionth of a second. During this time, the transition state remembered the direction from which the attacking fluorine atom came, rather than scrambling its energy like a hot molecule. This observation challenges the classic 90-year-old statistical model of the transition state, which assumes that the transition state scrambles its energy like a hot molecule.