Does the structure of an oscillating chemical system oscillate?

Abstract

The mesoscopic description of a system with chemical reactions predicts that if the detailed balance condition is not satisfied then spatial correlations between concentrations of reactants may appear. In this paper we use the molecular dynamics technique for reactive hard spheres in order to obtain correlation functions for fluctuations in concentrations of the reactant for a model of an oscillating chemical system. It is shown that these functions depend on time and therefore the local structure of the system oscillates. A comparison between a theory based on the master equation and results of simulations is presented.