Mean Field Treatment of Heterogeneous Steady State Kinetics

Abstract

We propose a method to quickly compute steady state populations of species undergoing a set of chemical reactions whose rate constants are heterogeneous. Using an average environment in place of an explicit nearest neighbor configuration, we obtain a set of equations describing a single fluctuating active site in the presence of an averaged bath. We apply this Mean Field Steady State (MFSS) method to a model of H[supscript 2] production on a disordered surface for which the activation energy for the reaction varies from site to site. The MFSS populations quantitatively reproduce the KMC results across the range of rate parameters considered.