The effect of mechanical deformation on spiral turbulence

– The behavior of spiral turbulence in mechanically deformed excitable media is investigated. Numerical simulations show that when the forcing frequency is chosen around the characteristic frequency of the system, complicated spiral turbulence may be quenched within a shorter evolution time, compared to the case free of mechanical deformation. It is shown that the observed phenomenon occurs due to enhancing the drift of spiral tips induced by mechanical deformation. A wide range of self-organized phenomena exists in spatially distributed systems. One of the most paradigmatic examples of spatiotemporal self-organized structures is a class of spiral waves, which have been observed in a variety of physical [1], chemical [2–5] and biological systems [6–9]. The attractiveness of investigating the dynamics of spiral waves is not only because they own a special structure, i.e., the core regarded as a phase-singular in mathematical language, but more important they contribute to the underlying class of cardiac disease also, such as tachycardia and fibrillation [6–9]. It is thus that, from a practical point of view, controlling the behaviors of spiral waves, particularly eliminating spiral waves and spiral turbulence, is extremely important and meaningful. Up to now, various methods to control two-, and even three-dimensional spiral waves and turbulence have been put forward [10–19]. On the other hand, Munuzuri et al. [20] designed an appropriate elastic excitable medium by incorporating the BZ reaction into a polyacrylamide-silica gel and experimentally studied the influence of periodic mechanical contraction of excitable media on the behavior of rotating spiral waves. Recently, we derived, directly from origin reaction-diffusion equations, a formula of drifting velocity using weak-deformation approximation and explained the drift of spiral waves under resonant frequency [21]. Besides, spiral breakup due to mechanical deformation was studied in our recent work [22]. To our knowledge, however, the influences of mechanical (∗) E-mail: [email protected] (∗∗) E-mail: [email protected].