3-DIMENSIONAL RECONSTRUCTION OF ORGANIZING CENTERS IN EXCITABLE CHEMICAL MEDIA

Excitable media support nonlinear waves that propagate as pulses, e.g. the action potential in nerve fibers and heart muscle, and concentration waves in autocatalytic chemical reactions. In two and three dimensions, these waves may self-organize into persistent vortex-like patterns of activity, described in terms of a singularity point (in 2D) or line (in 3D). Experimental studies have been limited by the absence of a direct method to observe the dynamics of the singularity. Here we present a method of singularity localization based on a time-space plot analysis, and apply it to filament dynamics in a 3D Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction. For the first time, the phenomenon of shrinking of a 3D non-planar filament is observed directly.