Ubiquitous “glassy” relaxation in catalytic reaction networks

Ubiquitous "glassy" relaxation in catalytic reaction networks.

Study of reversible catalytic reaction networks is important not only as an issue for chemical thermodynamics but also for protocells. From extensive numerical simulations and theoretical analysis, slow relaxation dynamics to sustain nonequlibrium states are commonly observed. These dynamics show two types of salient behaviors that are reminiscent of glassy behavior: slow relaxation along with ...

Discreteness-induced slow relaxation in reversible catalytic reaction networks.

Slowing down of the relaxation of the fluctuations around equilibrium is investigated both by stochastic simulations and by analysis of master equation of reversible reaction networks consisting of reactions between a pair of resource and the corresponding high-energy product that works as a catalyst for another resource-product reaction. As the number of molecules N is decreased, the relaxatio...

Catalytic reaction dynamics in inhomogeneous networks.

Biochemical reactions in a cell can be modeled by a catalytic reaction network (CRN). It has been reported that catalytic chain reactions occur intermittently in the CRN with a homogeneous random-graph topology and its avalanche-size distribution obeys a power law with the exponent 4/3 [A. Awazu and K. Kaneko, Phys. Rev. E 80, 010902(R) (2009)]. This fact indicates that the catalytic reaction d...

Structural relaxation and conductivity relaxation in glassy ionics

Stimulated and spontaneous relaxation in glassy systems

Recent numerical simulations of a disordered system [5] have shown the existence of two different relaxational processes (called stimulated and spontaneous) characterizing the relaxation observed in structural glasses. The existence of these two processes has been claimed to be at the roots of the intermittency phenomenon observed in recent experiments. Here we consider a generic system put in ...