Resonant drift of synchronized spiral waves in excitable media.

Abstract

Many methods have been employed to investigate the drift behavior of spiral waves in an effort to understand and control their dynamics. Here, we propose a joint method to control the dynamics of spiral waves by applying both a rotating external field and periodic forcing. First, spirals in different regimes (including rigidly rotating, meandering, and drifting spirals) are synchronized by suitable rotating external fields. Then, under weak periodic forcing at frequencies equal to those of the external fields, the synchronized spirals undergo a directional and simple drift. Dependence of the drift velocity of the synchronized spiral on the initial rotational phase of the rotating external field and on the initial phase of the periodic forcing is studied in detail. We hope that our theoretical results can be observed in experiments, such as in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction.