title: Nonequilibrium chemistry in confined environments: a lattice Brusselator model.
abstract: In this work, we study the effect of molecular crowding on a typical example of a chemical oscillator: the Brusselator model. We adopt to this end a nonequilibrium thermodynamic description, in which the size of particles is introduced via a lattice gas model. The impenetrability and finite volume of the species are shown to affect both the reaction rates and the diffusion terms in the evolution equations for the concentrations. The corrected scheme shows a more complex dynamical behavior than its ideal counterpart, including bistability and excitability. These results help to shed light on recent experimental and computational studies in biochemistry and surface chemistry, in which it was shown that confined environments may greatly affect chemical dynamics.
authors.affiliation: Center for Nonlinear Phenomena and Complex Systems (CENOLI), Code Postal 231, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1050 Brussels, Belgium. dbullara@ulb.ac.be
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Bullara
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: De Decker
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lefever