Properties of excitable media

The heart beat is initiated by an electrical wave that propagates over the heart prior to the beat.  Besides the heart, there are many other system in which such waves propagate.  They are called excitable media and include, for example, waves of chemical activity in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, aggregation of starving slime mold amoebae Dictyostelium discoideum, and catalytic reactions on platinum surfaces.

General properties of excitable media are often studied in simple mathematical models of excitable media.  A particularly simple and popular class is called FitzHugh-Nagumo models after its inventors.  We use FitzHugh-Nagumo and related models to study basic properties of excitable media in two and three dimensions.