Stochastic resonance in a chemical reaction

As a prototypical autocatalytic reaction, we study the Schlögl reaction scheme: A+2X⇄3X, B+X⇄C. We focus on the population of species X, and describe the process through a birth-death master equation to retain the effects of internal fluctuations. We show that in the bistable regime, internal fluctuations can strongly amplify the system’s response to weak, harmonic fields. The mechanism is a stochastic resonance in which the source of noise is the internal dynamics rather than a random environment.