A spontaneous process is one that occurs naturally under certain conditions. A nonspontaneous process, on the other hand, will not take place unless…

Salt particles that have dissolved in water never spontaneously come back together in solution to reform solid particles. Moreover, a gas that has…

In the quest to identify a property that may reliably predict the spontaneity of a process, a promising candidate has been identified: entropy.…

A pure, perfectly crystalline solid possessing no kinetic energy (that is, at a temperature of absolute zero, 0 K) may be described by a single…

Entropy is a state function, so the standard entropy change for a chemical reaction (ΔS°rxn) can be calculated from the difference in…

One of the challenges of using the second law of thermodynamics to determine if a process is spontaneous is that it requires measurements of the…

The spontaneity of a process depends upon the temperature of the system. Phase transitions, for example, will proceed spontaneously in one direction…

The free energy change for a reaction that occurs under the standard conditions of 1 bar pressure and at 298 K is called the standard free energy…

The free energy change for a process taking place with reactants and products present under nonstandard conditions (pressures other than 1 bar;…

The free energy change for a process may be viewed as a measure of its driving force. A negative value for ΔG represents a driving force for the…

Membrane protein folding is an emerging topic with both fundamental and health-related significance. The abundance of membrane proteins in cells…

Enzyme catalysis evolved in an aqueous environment. The influence of solvent dynamics on catalysis is, however, currently poorly understood and…

In nature, complex functional structures are formed by the self-assembly of biomolecules under mild conditions. Understanding the forces that control…