Oscillations in a Becker--Döring Model with Injection and Depletion

Abstract

We study the Becker--Döring bubblelator, a variant of the Becker--Döring coagulation-fragmentation system that models the growth of clusters by gain or loss of monomers. Motivated by models of gas evolution oscillators from physical chemistry, we incorporate the injection of monomers and depletion of large clusters. For a wide range of physical rates, the Becker--Döring system itself exhibits a dynamic phase transition as mass density increases past a critical value. We connect the Becker--Döring bubblelator to a transport equation coupled with an integrodifferential equation for the excess monomer density by formal asymptotics in the near-critical regime. For suitable injection/depletion rates, we argue that time-periodic solutions appear via a Hopf bifurcation. Numerics confirm that the generation and removal of large clusters can become desynchronized, leading to temporal oscillations associated with bursts of large-cluster nucleation.