On the effects of molecular fluctuations on models of chemical chaos

Abstract

In this work the effects of molecular or intrinsic fluctuations on some models of coupled chemical reactions exhibiting low-dimensional deterministic chaos are investigated. The study is performed by considering the system at the mesoscopic level, namely by stochastically simulating the corresponding chemical master equation. Two specific models are studied: the isothermal three-variable autocatalator of Peng et al. and a chemical version of Rössler’s model of spiral chaos. The main conclusions are that the corresponding strange attractors obtained in these models are robust against fluctuations, although when the system is near the onset of chaos the presence of fluctuations may anticipate the appearance of chaos.