Scaling of submicrometric Turing patterns in concentrated growing systems

Gabriel Morgado, Bogdan Nowakowski, and Annie Lemarchand

PHYSICAL REVIEW E (2018) 98, 032213

Abstract

The wavelength of a periodic spatial structure of Turing type is an intrinsic property of the considered reaction-diffusion dynamics and we address the question of its control at the microscopic scale for given dynamical parameters. The direct
simulation Monte Carlo method, initially introduced to simulate particle dynamics in rarefied gases, is adapted to the simulation of concentrated solutions. We per-form simulations of a submicrometric Turing pattern with appropriate boundary conditions and show that taking into account the role of the solvent in the chemical mechanism allows us to control the wavelength of the structure. Typically, doubling the concentration of the solution leads to decreasing the wavelength by two. The results could be used to design materials with controled submicrometric properties in chemical engineering. They could also be considered as a possible interpretation of proportion preservation of embryos in morphogenesis.

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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 711859.