Regensburg 2010 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 30: Posters II
DY 30.34: Poster
Thursday, March 25, 2010, 16:00–18:00, Poster C
Generating mechanism for fibrillatory states — •Claudia Lenk1, Mario Einax1, J. Michael Koehler1, and Philipp Maass1,2 — 1Institut für Physik, Technische Universität Ilmenau, 98684 Ilmenau, Germany. — 2Fachbereich Physik, Universität Osnabrück, 49069 Osnabrück, Germany.
Atrial fibrillation is the most common arrhythmia of the heart in the industrial countries. Although it is known since the early 1920s, its underlying mechanisms are still under discussion. We present a theoretical model for the generation of fibrillatory excitation patterns based on the mutual disturbance of two spatially separated pacemakers in the FitzHugh-Nagumo equations. The wavefronts emanating from these pacemakers propagate in regions connected by a small bridge. We find that the structure of the excitation patterns depends significantly on the pacemaker frequencies and the size and shape of the bridge. Irregular fibrillatory states can occur and the degree of irregularity is determined by two independent methods. We furthermore performed new experiments of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction in a silica gel with spatially inhomogeneous catalyst distribution to compare parts of our numerical results with measurements on a real system.