Dresden 2011 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 30: Reaction-Diffusion Systems

DY 30.1: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 17. März 2011, 10:15–10:30, ZEU 118

Interaction of a pair of scroll waves — •Dennis Kupitz and Marcus Hauser — Abteilung Biophysik, Institut für Experimentelle Physik, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Universitätsplatz 2, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany

Scroll waves are the three-dimensional counterparts of spiral waves occurring in excitable media. Single scroll waves may undergo a series of instabilities that play an important role in the formation of cardiac arrhythmias, like ventricular tachycardia. While the dynamics of single scroll waves have attracted some experimental effort, the interaction of scroll waves has so far received much less attention.

We present an experimental study of the interaction of two scroll waves created in a Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction medium and observed by optical tomography with a parallel beam technique. The scroll waves may either rotate in the same or in an opposite sense of rotation, thus leading to situations with different topological charges. The organising centres of the scrolls, the so-called filaments, were originally straight, and depending on the selected experimental conditions, they may either describe a circular or a meandering trajectory. The dynamics of pairs of co- and counter-rotating scroll waves were studied for both rigidly rotating and meandering filaments, leading to different types of collective filament behaviour.