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e. In physics, potential energy is the energy held by an object because of its position relative to other objects, stresses within itself, its electric charge, or other factors. [1][2] The term potential energy was introduced by the 19th-century Scottish engineer and physicist William Rankine, [3][4][5] although it has links to the ancient ...
Potential energy surface. A potential energy surface (PES) or energy landscape describes the energy of a system, especially a collection of atoms, in terms of certain parameters, normally the positions of the atoms. The surface might define the energy as a function of one or more coordinates; if there is only one coordinate, the surface is ...
Energy profile (chemistry) In theoretical chemistry, an energy profile is a theoretical representation of a chemical reaction or process as a single energetic pathway as the reactants are transformed into products. This pathway runs along the reaction coordinate, which is a parametric curve that follows the pathway of the reaction and indicates ...
The Morse potential, named after physicist Philip M. Morse, is a convenient interatomic interaction model for the potential energy of a diatomic molecule.It is a better approximation for the vibrational structure of the molecule than the quantum harmonic oscillator because it explicitly includes the effects of bond breaking, such as the existence of unbound states.
This can be explained with reference to potential energy diagrams: Energy diagrams showing how to interpret Hammond's Postulate In case (a), which is an exothermic reaction, the energy of the transition state is closer in energy to that of the reactant than that of the intermediate or the product.
He theorized that the progress of a chemical reaction could be described as a point in a potential energy surface with coordinates in atomic momenta and distances. In 1931, Henry Eyring and Michael Polanyi constructed a potential energy surface for the reaction below. This surface is a three-dimensional diagram based on quantum-mechanical ...
A thermodynamic potential (or more accurately, a thermodynamic potential energy) [1][2] is a scalar quantity used to represent the thermodynamic state of a system. Just as in mechanics, where potential energy is defined as capacity to do work, similarly different potentials have different meanings. The concept of thermodynamic potentials was ...
Gravitational energy or gravitational potential energy is the potential energy a massive object has due to its position in a gravitational field. It is the mechanical work done by the gravitational force to bring the mass from a chosen reference point (often an "infinite distance" from the mass generating the field) to some other point in the ...