  Catalysis, the acceleration of chemical reactions by molecules that are not
consumed in the process, is essential to living organisms but currently absent
in physical systems that aspire to emulate biological functionalities with
artificial components. Here we demonstrate how to design a catalyst using
spherical building blocks interacting via programmable potentials, and show
that a minimal catalyst design, a rigid dimer, can accelerate a ubiquitous
elementary reaction, the cleaving of a bond. By combining coarse-grained
molecular dynamics simulations and theory, and by comparing the mean reaction
time in the presence and absence of the catalyst, we derive geometrical and
physical constraints for its design and determine the reaction conditions under
which catalysis emerges in the system. The framework and design rules that we
introduce are general and can be applied to experimental systems on a wide
range of scales, from micron size DNA-coated colloids to centimeter size
magnetic handshake materials, opening the door to the realization of
self-regulated artificial systems with bio-inspired functionalities.
