Nonequilibrium Theoretical Framework and Universal Design Principles of Oscillation-Driven Catalysis

At stationary environmental conditions, a catalyst's reaction kinetics may be restricted by its available designs and thermodynamic laws. Thus, its stationary performances may experience practical or theoretical restraints (e.g., catalysts cannot invert the spontaneous direction of a chemical reaction). However, many works have reported that if environments change rapidly, catalysts can be driven away from stationary states and exhibit anomalous performance. We present a general geometric nonequilibrium theory to explain anomalous catalytic behaviors driven by rapidly oscillating environments where stationary-environment restraints are broken. It leads to a universal design principle of novel catalysts with oscillation-pumped performances. Even though a single free energy landscape cannot describe catalytic kinetics at various environmental conditions, we propose a novel control-conjugate landscape to encode the reaction kinetics over a range of control parameters λ, inspired by the Arrhenius form. The control-conjugate landscape significantly simplifies the design principle applicable to large-amplitude environmental oscillations.