title: Minimum size for a nanoscale temperature discriminator based on a thermochemical system.
abstract: What are the limits of size reduction for information processing devices based on chemical reactions? In this paper, we partially answer this question. We show that a thermochemical system can be used to design a discriminator of the parameters associated with oscillations of the ambient temperature. Depending on the amplitude and frequency of the oscillations, the system exhibits sharp transitions between different types of its time evolutions. This phenomenon can be used to discriminate between different parameter values describing the oscillating environment. We investigate the reliability of the thermochemical discriminator as a function of the number of molecules involved in the reactions. A stochastic model of chemical reactions and heat exchange with the neighborhood, in which the number of molecules explicitly appears, is introduced. For the selected values of the parameters, thermochemical discriminators operating with less than 10(5) molecules appear to be unreliable.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Kasprzaka 44/52, 01-224 Warsaw, Poland. jgorecki@ichf.edu.pl.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gorecki
authors.affiliation: Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Kasprzaka 44/52, 01-224 Warsaw, Poland. jgorecki@ichf.edu.pl and Physics Laboratory, Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Nowoursynowska 159, 02-776, Warsaw, Poland.
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Nowakowski
authors.affiliation: Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Al. Lotnikow 32/46, 02-668 Warsaw, Poland.
authors.forename: J N
authors.initials: JN
authors.lastname: Gorecka
authors.affiliation: Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06, Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de la Matière Condensée, 4 place Jussieu, 75005 Paris, France and CNRS, LPTMC, UMR 7600, Paris, France.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lemarchand