NONLINEAR CHEMICAL-DYNAMICS - OSCILLATIONS, PATTERNS, AND CHAOS

Chemical reactions with nonlinear kinetic behavior can give rise to a remarkable set of spatiotemporal phenomena. These include periodic and chaotic changes in concentration, traveling waves of chemical reactiv ity, and stationary spatial (Turing) patterns. Although chemists were initially skeptical of the existence and the relevance of these phenom ena, much progress has been made in the past two decades in characteri zing, designing, modeling, and understanding them. Several nonlinear d ynamical phenomena in chemical systems provide simpler analogues of be haviors found in biological systems.