Some Thoughts and/or Questions about Activation Energy and Pre-exponential Factor

摘要

The first part of this paper presents a brief historical account of the Arrhenius law, starting from the seminal paper by Arrhenius (1889) up to theoretical developments mainly based on the rate theory. The second part describes the so called compensation rule (Meyer-Neldel rule), a correlation between activation enthalpy and entropy (or between pre-exponential factor and activation energy), and discusses whether this correlation is trivial or bears some physical meaning.