DYNAMICS OF NONLINEAR-WAVES IN CHEMICAL ACTIVE MEDIA

Chemical waves are prototypes of self-organized spatio-temporal structures observed in a large class of distributed active media of physical, chemical or biological origin far from thermodynamic equilibrium. We discuss recent progress in the understanding of complex dynamics of spiral waves which was obtained by exploiting the possibility of external control of pattern formation in a light-sensitive modification of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. Also we comment on some aspects of wave propagation in heterogeneous media.