Photo: Conrad Erb — Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
Dudley R. Herschbach
born 1932 · United States · Born 1900–1939
Nobel Chemistry 1986
American physical chemist who pioneered crossed molecular beam experiments, letting chemists watch single reactive collisions and measure how products scatter.
Nobel-winning work
Shared the prize with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi for contributions to the dynamics of elementary chemical processes. Herschbach developed crossed molecular beam machines that collide two reagent beams under vacuum, revealing angular and energy distributions of products — a molecular movie of how a reaction actually proceeds.
Fields
Related topics
Complex reaction mechanisms, catalysis
Building rate laws from elementary steps, steady-state and rate-determining-step approximations, chain reactions, and how catalysts open alternative pathways.
Transition state theory
Reaction rates as a passage over a saddle point: the activated complex, the Eyring equation, activation thermodynamics (ΔG‡, ΔH‡, ΔS‡), and where the theory fails — recrossing, tunnelling and dynamics.