On the roles of the Bessel and Poisson distributions in chemical kinetics

Abstract

We consider the Darvey, Ninham and Staff model for reversible chemical reactions, in the case where the ratio of the rate constants is either very large or very small. It is shown that the distribution of the number of molecules at equilibrium may sometimes be closely approximated by the Poisson distribution, and on other occasions, by a distribution with much smaller tails than the Poisson. The second type of approximating distribution is termed a Bessel distribution, and its properties are studied.