imbalance

The situation in which reaction parameters that characterize different bond forming or bond breaking processes in the same reaction have developed to different extents as the transition state is approached along some arbitrarily defined reaction coordinate. For example, in the nitroalkane anomaly, the Brønsted exponent for proton removal is smaller than the Brønsted for the nitroalkane, because of imbalance between the amount of bond breaking and resonancedelocalization in the transition state. Imbalance is common in reactions such as elimination, addition and other complex reactions that involve proton (hydron) transfer.