Conspectus
Hysteresis is ubiquitous in nature and biology.
It appears in ferromagnetism,
ferroelectrism, traffic congestion, river sedimentation, electronics,
thermoresponses, cell division, differentiation, and apoptosis. Hysteresis
phenomena are beyond equilibrium and involve nonlinear, bistable,
time delay, and memory events, which are described in input/output
profiles by different outputs during continuous decreases and increases
in input intensity. Although hysteresis profiles in these phenomena
appear similar, the mechanisms underlying them are complex, and their
basic understanding is desired. In this Account, I describe thermal
hysteresis caused by molecules dispersed in dilute solutions containing
optically active helicene oligomers, which form homo- and heterodouble
helices, the cooling and heating processes of which cause different
structural changes with regard to their relative concentrations. Reversible
self-catalytic reactions are involved in the formation of a double
helix, which catalyzes its own formation. The reactions accelerate
as they progress, in contrast to ordinary reactions, which exhibit
monotonic retardation as they progress. Thermal hysteresis involving
reversible self-catalytic reactions exhibits notable phenomena, when
various cooling/heating inputs are applied during the reaction; these
phenomena are shown herein with profiles of experimental results of
Δε outputs obtained by circular dichroism (CD) plotted
against temperature inputs. Thermal hysteresis is discussed in terms
of (1) two states of the homodouble helix and a random coil involving
one reversible self-catalytic reaction and (2) three states of enantiomeric
heterodouble helices and a random coil involving two reversible self-catalytic
reactions. Repeated cooling and heating processes provide the same
stable thermal hysteresis loops, when the initial and final high-temperature
states are under equilibrium, and nonloop and unstable thermal hysteresis
appears when whole the systems are beyond equilibrium. Diverse thermal
hysteresis loops are obtained under different temperature change conditions
for different oligomers. The mechanism of thermal hysteresis involves
different macroscopic mechanisms at a fixed temperature, when the
relative concentrations of substrates/products and the reaction direction
differ. Microscopic mechanisms, which are shown by energy diagrams,
are fixed at a temperature irrespective of cooling or heating. A comparison
of thermal hysteresis loops and equilibrium curves provides distances
to the metastable states on the loops from equilibrium, and reactions
occur from the metastable states toward equilibrium. Notable phenomena
described herein include bistability, high sensitivity to small concentration
changes, equilibrium crossing, three-state one-directional structural
change caused by a single heating procedure, reaction shortcuts, the
memory effect on thermal history, figure-eight thermal hysteresis,
chemical oscillation, stable and unstable thermal hysteresis, double-helix
formation only under ...