Influence of surface structure on the kinetics of diffusion-controlled reactive processes on molecular organizates and colloidal catalysts

At the molecular level, the surface of a colloidal catalyst particle or molecular organizate (such as a cell or vesicle) is not smooth and continuous, but rather differentiated by the geometry of the constituents and, if the surface composition is not homogeneous, often organized into clusters or domains. The authors develop a model to study the influence of such structure on the efficiency of encounter-controlled, surface-mediated reactive processes. Based on the structure presented, the authors consider a target molecule A anchored to the surface at one of the N sites and a coreactant B free to migrate among the N-1 satellite sites and study the dynamics of the diffusion-controlled irreversible reaction A+B→C by formulating a stochastic master equation for each surface geometry considered and solving this equation numerically for two classes of initial conditions.