Decomposition theory of chemical reactions

The coupled channel formulation is utilized to variationally derive approximate closed-form expressions for reactive transition matrices. In conjunction with this effort it is shown that the effect of differing choices of possible channel coupling arrays becomes important when incomplete channel basis sets are used. Generalized techniques are employed to derive the necessary variational principles. The inherent coupling of the Green's functions in the resulting expression for the transition matrix makes inclusion of continuum states in the basis sets less crucial. The practical viability of this formulation as a computational scheme for chemical systems is discussed.