title: Buckling of scroll waves.
abstract: 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 a scroll wave will have a tendency to deform into a buckled, precessing state. Experimentally this will be seen as meandering of the spiral wave on the surface, the amplitude of which grows with the thickness of the layer, until a breakup to scroll wave turbulence happens. We present a simplified theory for this phenomenon and illustrate it with numerical examples.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematical Physics and Astronomy, Ghent University, Krijgslaan 281, 9000 Ghent, Belgium.
authors.forename: Hans
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Dierckx
authors.forename: Henri
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Verschelde
authors.forename: Özgür
authors.initials: Ö
authors.lastname: Selsil
authors.forename: Vadim N
authors.initials: VN
authors.lastname: Biktashev