SCALING ANOMALIES IN REACTION FRONT DYNAMICS OF CONFINED SYSTEMS

We study the kinetics of the reaction front for diffusion-reaction systems of the form A + B --> C which are confined to one dimension, and in which the reactants are initially separated. For the case in which both A and B diffuse, the spatial moments of the reaction front are characterized by a hierarchy of exponents, bounded by the exponents sigma = 1/4 and delta = 3/8 characterizing the asymptotic time dependence of the distance l(AB) (t) between nearest neighbor A and B particles and the fluctuations of the midpoint m(t) between them, respectively. We argue that this behavior arise from confinement effects and will appear in other confined systems.