Spiral wave dynamics under feedback control derived from a variety of sensory domains

Abstract

The dynamics of rigidly rotating spiral waves in a reaction layer with light-dependent excitability is studied by numerical integration of a reaction-diffusion equation system with a feedback control. The feedback signal is derived from sensory domains with different geometries by introducing an algorithm that computes the illumination intensity to be proportional to the average wave activity in these domains. It is shown that the shape and size of the trajectories of the spiral wave tip as well as the stability of the spiral rotation depend sensitively on the choice of the geometry of the sensory domain. The numerically observed effects are complemented by constructing a flow map based on an analysis of the feedback signal. © 2004 The American Physical Society.