The following mechanism has been proposed for the exothermic catalyzed complex reaction:
\(A + B \overset{\text{slow}}{\underset{\text{fast}}{\rightleftharpoons}} IAB \xrightarrow{k_1} AB + I \xrightarrow{k_2} P + A \)
If k1 is much smaller than k2, the most suitable qualitative plot of potential energy (P.E.) versus reaction coordinate (R.C.) for the above reaction would show a multi-step reaction profile, indicating a slow initial step followed by a fast subsequent step, as well as the exothermic nature of the reaction.
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