English

Generation of finite wave trains in excitable media

Pattern Formation and Solitons 2008-09-12 v2

Abstract

Spatiotemporal control of excitable media is of paramount importance in the development of new applications, ranging from biology to physics. To this end we identify and describe a qualitative property of excitable media that enables us to generate a sequence of traveling pulses of any desired length, using a one-time initial stimulus. The wave trains are produced by a transient pacemaker generated by a one-time suitably tailored spatially localized finite amplitude stimulus, and belong to a family of fast pulse trains. A second family, of slow pulse trains, is also present. The latter are created through a clumping instability of a traveling wave state (in an excitable regime) and are inaccessible to single localized stimuli of the type we use. The results indicate that the presence of a large multiplicity of stable, accessible, multi-pulse states is a general property of simple models of excitable media.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0807.1514,
  title  = {Generation of finite wave trains in excitable media},
  author = {Arik Yochelis and Edgar Knobloch and Yuanfang Xie and Zhilin Qu and Alan Garfinkel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0807.1514},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

6 pages, 6 figures