Exploiting the effect of noise on a chemical system to obtain logic gates

¹  The Institute of Mathematical Sciences - Taramani, Chennai 600 113, India
²  Facultad de Ciencias, UAEM - Avenida Universidad 1001, Colonia Chamilpa 62209, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico
³  Centro de Investigaciones Químicas, UAEM - Avenida Universidad 1001, Colonia Chamilpa 62209, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico
⁴  Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay - Powai, Mumbai 400076, India

Corresponding author: sudeshna@imsc.res.in

Received: 6 February 2009
Accepted: 29 May 2009

Abstract

Small added noise has been predicted to direct certain classes of chemical systems towards a specific enantiomeric direction, with the dependence of product asymmetry on noise levels being non-monotonic and nonlinear. Associating the product selection in such chemical reactions with different outputs, and varying noise levels to encode the inputs, we observe that the response of the system mirrors the input-output relations of different fundamental logic operations. So the complex enantioselection, under the influence of noise, allows the chemical system to effectively behave as a logic gate. This observation may have potential applications in the design of chemical gates, as well as provide understanding of the information processing capacity of naturally occurring chiral symmetry-breaking chemical systems, with noise acting as the logic pattern selector.