CONTINUUM THEORY OF PERCOLATION AND ASSOCIATION

The development of a general theory of clustering is sketched. The pri mary focus is on the use of the pair connectedness function in problem s of correlated clustering and on the Ornstein-Zernike formalism that has been developed to evaluate this function and relate it to observed mesoscopic and macroscopic properties. The treatment here stresses pe rcolation, which has already been found to be directly relevant to com plex-matter problems. It goes on to show the way the general theory be comes a theory of chemical association when applied to chemically asso ciating fluids. In the complete-association limit, it becomes a site-s ite theory of molecular fluids.