title: Period-2 spiral waves supported by nonmonotonic wave dispersion.
abstract: Rotating spiral waves appear ubiquitously in a wide range of nonlinear systems, and they play important roles in many biological phenomena. Recently, unusual spiral waves, which support period-2 dynamics, have been found in several different systems including cardiac tissues as well as nonlinear chemical reaction-diffusion systems. They are potentially significant as an intermediate dynamic state linking regularly rotating period-1 spiral waves to complex dynamic states such as cardiac fibrillations; for example, it is intrinsic of period-2 spiral waves to have "line defects" and their instability can lead to a spatiotemporal chaos. Previous mathematical models regarding period-2 spiral waves are mostly based on a coupled system of period-2 oscillators, but these are inappropriate for the description of a large class of systems that are composed of (nonoscillatory) excitable elements--a good example being the heart. In this paper we hypothesize that excitable media, which support a nonmonotonic conduction velocity dispersion relation, can sustain period-2 oscillatory spiral waves. We explicitly demonstrate that the new mechanism can create period-2 spirals by computer simulations on a simple mathematical model describing spiral wave front dynamics.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Korea University, Center for Cell Dynamics, Seoul 136-701, Korea.
authors.forename: Okyu
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Kwon
authors.forename: Tae Yun
authors.initials: TY
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Kyoung J
authors.initials: KJ
authors.lastname: Lee