Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking: The Case of Crazy Clock and Beyond

TL;DR

This paper links the crazy-clock phenomenon in oscillatory chemical reactions to spontaneous symmetry breaking, providing a novel explanation supported by extensive experiments and statistical analysis, revealing new insights into nonlinear chemical dynamics.

Contribution

It is the first to connect crazy-clock behavior with symmetry-breaking phenomena in oscillatory reactions, using statistical cluster analysis to uncover hidden dynamics.

Findings

Transition behavior influenced by mixing rate and stirrer shape

Clusters reveal time-domains of transition likelihood

Stirring leads to more distinct and compact clusters

Abstract

In this account, we describe the crazy-clock phenomenon involving the state I (low iodide and iodine concentration) to state II (high iodide and iodine concentration with new iodine phase) transition after a Briggs-Rauscher (BR) oscillatory process. While the BR crazy-clock phenomenon is known, it is the first time that crazy-clock behavior is linked and explained with the symmetry-breaking phenomenon, highlighting the entire process in a novel way. The presented phenomenon has been thoroughly investigated by running more than 60 experiments, and evaluated by using statistical cluster K-means analysis. The mixing rate, as well as the magnetic bar shape and dimensions, have a strong influence on the transition appearance. Although the transition for both mixing and no-mixing conditions are taking place completely randomly, by using statistical cluster analysis we obtain different numbers of clusters (showing the time-domains where the transition is more likely to occur). In the case of stirring, clusters are more compact and separated, revealed new hidden details regarding the chemical dynamics of nonlinear processes. The significance of the presented results is beyond oscillatory reaction kinetics since the described example belongs to the small class of chemical systems that shows intrinsic randomness in their response and it might be considered as a real example of a classical liquid random number generator.