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| Chemical reactions are regarded as the most elementary prototype of change of the states or matter. How a rearrangement of atoms constituting a system occurs is one of the most intriguing fundamental questions from the day of alchemy. However, the question of why the system can change from one stable state to another is still unresolved. For example, in the case of isolated systems, i.e., many-degrees of freedom (dof) Hamiltonian systems, the total energy of the system should be larger than the barrier height on the potential. However, this is just only the necessary condition because even at the total energy higher than the saddle point energy, the system may go back to the state from which it climbs after wondering the region of the saddle. In other words, what origin differentiates the initial conditions which bring the system to the different states? Moreover, most of the reactions or conformational changes of biomolecules undergo in a thermally fluctuating environment. In this presentation, I overview some of recent progresses in our group and discuss the resonance condition between reactive and nonreactive dofs for systems under thermal fluctuation in terms of normal form theory for multidimensional Langevin systems, with some future perspectives. |
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