CERN Accelerating science

Preprint
Report number	NORDITA-2005-10
Title	Dissociation in a polymerization model of homochirality
Author(s)	Brandenburg, A ; Andersen, A C ; Nilsson, M
Publication	2005
Imprint	7 Feb 2005
Number of pages	13
Abstract	A fully self-contained model of homochirality is presented that contains the effects of both polymerization and dissociation. The dissociation fragments are assumed to replenish the substrate from which new monomers can grow and undergo new polymerization. The mean length of isotactic polymers is found to grow slowly with the normalized total number of corresponding building blocks. Alternatively, if one assumes that the dissociation fragments themselves can polymerize further, then this corresponds to a strong source of short polymers, and an unrealistically short average length of only 3. By contrast, without dissociation, isotactic polymers becomes infinitely long.