Flash Vacuum Thermolysis (FVT) techniques have become well-established methods and occupy an increasingly important place in synthesis. Gas Phase Reactions in Organic Synthesis is a complete review of the applications of flash vacuum thermolysis in organic chemistry; it features new developments in FVT, flow thermolysis and vacuum gas-solid reactions which have appeared in scientific literature since 1980.

The present monograph appears after the death of Professor V. N. Kondratiev, one of those scientists who have greatly contributed to the foundation of contem porary gas kinetics. The most fundamental idea of chemical kinetics, put for ward at the beginning of the twentieth century and connected with names such as W. Nernst, M. Bodenstein, N. N. Semenov, and C. N. Hinshelwood, was that the complex chemical reactions are in fact a manifestation of a set of simpler elementary reactions involving but a small number of species. V. N. Kondratiev was one of the first to adopt this idea and to start investigations on the elementary chemical reactions proper. These investigations revealed explicitly that every elementary reaction in turn consisted of many elementary events usually referred to as elementary processes. It took some time to realize that an elementary reaction, represented in a very simple way by a macroscopic kinetic equation, can be described on a microscopic level by a generalized Boltzmann equation. Neverheless, up to the middle of the twentieth century, gas kinetics was mainly concerned with the interpretation of complex chemical reactions via a set of elementary reactions. But later on, the situation changed drastically. First, the conditions for reducing microscopic cquations to macroscopic ones were clearly set up. These are essentially based on the fact that the small perturbations of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution are caused by the reaction proper.

The book brings together, for the first time, all aspects of reactions of metallic species in the gas phase and gives an up-to-date overview of the field. Reactions covered include those of atomic, other free radical and transient neutral species, as well as ions. Experimental and theoretical work is reviewed and the efforts to establish a closer link between these approaches are discussed. The field is mainly approached from a fundamental point-of-view, but the applied problems which have helped stimulate the interest are pointed out and form the major subject of the final chapters. These emphasize the competition between purely gas-phase and gas-surface reactions.

This volume consists of edited papers presented at the International Symposion Gas Phase Chemical Reaction Systems: Experiments and Models 100 Years After Max Bodenslein, held at the Internationales Wissenschaftsforum Heidelberg (IWH) in Heidelberg during July 25-28, 1995. The intention of this symposion was to bring together leading researchers from the fields of reaction dynamics, kinetics, catalysis and reactive flow model ling to discuss and review the advances in the understanding of chemical kinetics about 100 years after Max Bodenstein's pioneering work on the "hydrogen iodine reaction", which he carried out at the Chemistry Institute of the University of Heidelberg. The idea to focus in his doctoral thesis [1] on this reaction was brought up by his supervisor Victor Meyer (successor of Robert Bunsen at the Chemistry Institute of the University of Heidelberg) and originated from the non reproducible behaviour found by Bunsen and Roscoe in their early photochemical investigations of the H2/Cl2 system [2] and by van't Hoff [3], and V. Meyer and co-workers [4] in their experiments on the slow combustion of H2/02 mixtures.