New family of homogeneous chemical oscillators: chlorite–iodate–substrate

Abstract

Interest in oscillating chemical reactions arises because these systems serve as models of temporal organization in biological systems, as starting points for the development of spatial structure in initially homogeneous systems and as instructive examples of the wide variety of dynamic phenomena possible in chemical systems far from equilibrium. One obstacle to the development of a general theory of chemical oscillation has been the small number of fundamentally distinct homogeneous oscillators and the failure of efforts to design new oscillating reactions. We recently suggested a systematic approach to the construction of chemical oscillators and used it to produce a homogeneous oscillating reaction: the chlorite–iodate–arsenite oscillator1. We now report that the above system is the prototype of a family of homogeneous oscillators, all of whose members have the species chlorite and iodate in common, but which can utilize a wide variety of reducing agents or substrates in place of arsenite.