English

Boundary-driven delayed-feedback control of spatiotemporal dynamics in excitable media

Biological Physics 2025-12-02 v3

Abstract

Scroll-wave instabilities in excitable domains are central to life-threatening arrhythmias, yet practical methods to stabilize these dynamics remain limited. Here, we investigate the effects of boundary layer heterogeneities in the spatiotemporal dynamics of a quasi-2D semidiscrete excitable model. We reveal that a novel boundary-driven mechanism suppresses meandering and chaotic spiral dynamics. We show how the strength of the heterogeneities mediates the emergence of this regulation through a pinning-unpinning-like transition. We derive a reduced 2D model and find that a decrease in bulk excitability and a boundary-driven delayed-feedback underlie the stabilization. Our results may point to alternative methods to control arrhythmias.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.00183,
  title  = {Boundary-driven delayed-feedback control of spatiotemporal dynamics in excitable media},
  author = {Sebastian Echeverria-Alar and Wouter-Jan Rappel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.00183},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:29:29.387Z