Related papers: Critical role of pinning defects in scroll-wave br…
Three-dimensional excitable systems can selforganize vortex patterns that rotate around one-dimensional phase singularities called filaments. In experiments with the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction and numerical simulations, we pin these…
A scroll wave in a sufficiently thin layer of an excitable medium with negative filament tension can be stable nevertheless due to filament rigidity. Above a certain critical thickness of the medium, such scroll wave will have a tendency to…
Three-dimensional excitable systems can create nonlinear scroll waves that rotate around one-dimensional phase singularities. Recent theoretical work predicts that these filaments drift along step-like height variations. Here we test this…
Nonlinear waves of the reaction-diffusion (RD) type occur in many biophysical systems, including the heart, where they initiate cardiac contraction. Such waves can form vortices called scroll waves, which result in the onset of…
Spiral waves are investigated in oscillatory media exhibiting period-doubling bifurcations. In the period-doubled and chaotic regimes, the rotational symmetry of the spiral wave is broken. The loss of symmetry takes the form of…
Scroll waves are three-dimensional excitation patterns that rotate around a central filament curve; they occur in many physical, biological and chemical systems. We explicitly derive the equations of motion for scroll wave filaments in…
The heartbeat is mediated between cardiac cells by waves of electrical depolarisation. During cardiac arrhythmias, electrical activity was found to be organised in scroll waves which rotate around a dynamical filament curve. In this thesis,…
Spiral waves in two-dimensional excitable media have been observed experimentally and studied extensively. It is now well-known that the symmetry properties of the medium of propagation drives many of the dynamics and bifurcations which are…
We study the dynamics of waves in a system of diffusively coupled discrete nonlinear sources. We show that the system exhibits burst waves which are periodic in a traveling-wave reference frame. We demonstrate that the burst waves are…
Rotating scroll waves are self-organising patterns which are found in many oscillating or excitable systems. Here we show that quasi-periodic (meandering) scroll waves, which include the rotors that organise cardiac arrhythmias, exhibit…
Inert, spherical heterogeneities can pin three-dimensional scroll waves in the excitable Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. Three pinning sites cause initially circular rotation backbones to approach equilateral triangles. The resulting…
Pinning and depinning of wave fronts are ubiquitous features of spatially discrete systems describing a host of phenomena in physics, biology, etc. A large class of discrete systems is described by overdamped chains of nonlinear oscillators…
Spiral wave patterns observed in models of cardiac arrhythmias and chemical oscillations develop alternans and stationary line defects, which can both be thought of as period-doubling instabilities. These instabilities are observed on…
The transition from complex-periodic to chaotic behavior is investigated in oscillatory media supporting spiral waves. We find turbulent regimes characterized by the spontaneous nucleation, proliferation and erratic motion of…
Substrate defects crucially influence the onset of sliding drop motion under lateral driving. A finite force is necessary to overcome the pinning influence even of microscale heterogeneities. The depinning dynamics of three-dimensional…
We study the drift of spiral waves in a simple model of heterogeneous excitable medium, having gradients in local excitability or cellular coupling. For the first time, we report the anomalous drift of spiral waves towards regions having…
Abnormal electrical activity from the boundaries of ischemic cardiac tissue is recognized as one of the major causes in generation of ischemia-reperfusion arrhythmias. Here we present theoretical analysis of the waves of electrical activity…
We study depinning of vortex chains in channels formed by static, disordered vortex arrays. Depinning is governed either by the barrier for defect nucleation or for defect motion, depending on whether the chain periodicity is commensurate…
Turbulence of scroll waves is a sort of spatio-temporal chaos that exists in three-dimensional excitable media. Cardiac tissue and the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction are examples of such media. In cardiac tissue, chaotic behaviour is…
Scroll waves are three-dimensional analogs of spiral waves. The linear stability spectrum of untwisted and twisted scroll waves is computed for a two-variable reaction-diffusion model of an excitable medium. Different bands of modes are…