Local dissipative Hamiltonian description of reversible reaction networks

7 páginas, 2 figurasIn this letter we show that closed reversible chemical reaction networks with independent elementary reactions admit a global pseudo- Hamiltonian structure which is at least locally dissipative around any equilibrium point. The structure matrix of the Hamiltonian description reflects the graph topology of the reaction network and it is a smooth function of the concentrations of the chemical species in the positive orthant. The physical interpretation of the description is briefly explained and two illustrative examples are presented for global and local dissipative Hamiltonian description, respectively.The authors acknowledge financial support received from the Spanish Government (MCyT Projects PPQ2001-3643 & DPI2004-07444-C04-03) and Xunta de Galicia (PGIDIT02- PXIC40209PN). This research was partially supported by the Hungarian grant nos. K67625, F046223, which are gratefully acknowledged. The second author is a grantee of the Bolyai J´anos Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.Peer reviewe