Chemistry of Dark Clouds: Databases, Networks, and Models

Chemical models have been developed over the years by astrophysicists to study the pro- cesses at play in the various environments of the interstellar medium (ISM) that define the chemical composition of the gas and the dust. These qualitative aspects of the model predictions have been improved from a chemical point of view thanks to many recent developments of the experimental technics and theoretical methods that aim at studying the individual reactions in conditions as close to the ISM conditions as possible and characterize the rate constants of their efficiency. These models have also been more and more associated with dynamical evolution of the ISM physical conditions (for star forming regions for instance) since the chemical composition is far from steady-state in such regions. In this paper, we try to assess the state of the art concerning the chemical modeling of dark clouds, the initial step for the formation of stars and disks.