External noise-induced phenomena in CO oxidation on single crystal surfaces.

The influence of external noise on minimalistic models for the catalytic CO oxidation on Ir(111) and Pt(111) is studied by means of the adiabatic elimination technique. Two models, which reproduce the bistable behavior usually observed in CO oxidation on Pt group metal surfaces, are analyzed. The noise is superposed on the fraction of CO in the constant gas flow directed at the surfaces and the resulting stochastic systems are reduced after the adiabatic elimination of oxygen coverage. This reduction allows us to analyze theoretically the interplay between external noise and the kinetic bistability of CO oxidation. We report the phenomena of noise-induced shifts of steady states and noise-induced jumps between stable steady states. We also present evidence for noise-induced transitions from mono- to bistability. The theoretical results are compared with simulations of the original two-variable stochastic reaction systems.