Naoko Nakagawa

Department of Mathematical Sciences, Ibaraki University, Japan

A novel mechanism for the appearance of oriented processes is proposed with a flexible dynamical system. Here the subject is a particle motion coupled nonlinearly with one-dimensional lattice, and the barrier overcoming process along the lattice is studied in detail. Without asuuming any external switching of potentials, multi-dimensional flexible dynamics promote the oriented processes under non-equilibrium condition, where reaction paths deviate from that at equilibrium with an accompanying violation of symmetry between the forward and the reverse paths. Along each path, distinct bottleneck points are proposed as a rate-controlling factor, insted of saddle points. The direction-dependent activation energies evaluated from the actual potential energy at these points are found to satisfy Arrhenius-like law for the rate constants. This study implies a breakdown of transition state theory.