ABSTRACT
A reaction mechanism is a description of the bonding events that occur along the pathway reactants follow to form products. Rates are inversely proportional to the energy barriers that prevent a specific reaction or reaction step from occurring; this barrier is called the activation energy, or activation barrier, for the reaction or step. The activation energy represents the energy that must be added to reactants to allow bonding changes to occur. A reaction mechanism is an accepted sequence of elementary reaction steps, which describe all bond making and bond breaking events characterizing the change of reactant molecules to product molecules. Complete reactions, indicated by a balanced equation, can be composed of one or more elementary reaction steps. When all bonds are broken and/or made simultaneously then the complete reaction mechanism is one-step.
