Kinetic models in spin chemistry. 1. The hyperfine interaction

Kinetic models for quantum systems are quite popular due to their simplicity, although they are difficult to justify. We show that the transformation from quantum to kinetic description can be done exactly for the hyperfine interaction of one nuclei with arbitrary spin; more spins are described with a very good approximation. The crucial points are: to represents the quantum coherent oscillations by first order rate constants, and to determine the number of kinetic channels corresponding to a given interaction. We consider a radical pair system with spin selective reactions and calculate the spin induced enhancement of the reaction yield.