Some comments on nonequilibrium phase transitions in chemical systems

Two new approaches for investigating critical fluctuations near an instability point of unstable chemical models are proposed. The master equation approach is used. For a homogeneous system without the effect of diffusion, three single-component chemical systems exhibiting critical behavior are considered. The cumulant functions are expanded in a small parameter-the inverse size of the system-and singular perturbation solutions of the master equation are developed. Exponents describing the divergence of the second-order variance are found to be classical. For a system including diffusion effects, spatial correlations for a quasi-one-dimensional case are investigated by considering scale transformation behavior within the multivariate master equation formalism.This work was supported in part by NSF grants MPS-7411925 and CHE 76-05583.