The existence and uniqueness of steady states for a class of chemical reaction networks (Q1912920)

In this paper, chemical reaction networks are described by a triple \((S, C, R)\) of finite sets. \(S\) is the set of species involved in the reaction, \(C\) is the set of complexes that appear before or after the reaction arrows and \(R\) is a subset of \(C \times C\) which relates complexes to each other. Moreover, further relations are introduced in \(C\) that represent various ways of linkages between elements of \(C\) and give rise to certain equivalence relations which are characteristic for the network. By means of the numbers of the classes of these equivalence relations and by taking into account the so called rank of the network, a notion which is derived by endowing the reaction system with a vector space structure, an integer index \(\delta\) is introduced, the deficiency of the system. The deficiency \(\delta\) is characteristic for the system in the following way: If \(\delta = 0\), a certain kind of stable behaviour is ensured for the mass action differential equations corresponding to the network in the sense that this kind of stability persists for all positive values of the rate constants. It is the aim of the paper to discuss networks of non-zero deficiency that have the same or similar properties as the systems of deficiency zero. In particular, networks are characterized for which the corresponding system of mass action equations can admit no more than one equilibrium for all presumable values of the rate constants. By extending the notion of deficiency to individual linkage-classes the so called ``Deficiency-One Theorem'' is proved. Roughly, this theorem asserts that for a certain class of networks for which the deficiency of all linkage classes does not exceed one (hence the name) the system behaves in the very same way as systems of deficiency \(\delta = 0\) do.