2025/05/09 by Mahesh Kumar Mulimani, Mulimani, Mahesh Kumar, Wouter‐Jan Rappel +2 · 1 voice
Computer Science · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Annihilation #Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #Cardiac Arrhythmias and Treatments #Cardiac electrophysiology and arrhythmias #Chaotic Dynamics (nlin.CD) #Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) #Control theory (sociology) #Excitable medium #FOS: Physical sciences #Intermittency #Nonlinear Dynamics and Pattern Formation #Spiral (railway) #Spiral wave #nlin.CD #physics.bio-ph #physics.comp-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.06427
openalex publication_date 2025/05/09 · arxiv published 2025/05/09 · arxiv updated 2025/05/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Cardiac models are examples of excitable systems and can support stable spiral waves. For certain parameter values, however, these spiral waves can become unstable, resulting in spiral defect chaos (SDC), characterized by the continuous creation and annihilation of spiral waves and thought to underlie atrial fibrillation. During SDC, the number of spiral waves fluctuates and eventually drops to zero, marking the termination of activity. In this work, we demonstrate that varying a single parameter allows the system to transition from SDC to a single spiral wave, passing through an intermediate regime of intermittency. In this intermittent dynamics, intervals of SDC are sandwiched between non-SDC intervals during which the number of spiral waves remains small and constant. We quantify this intermittency and show that the mean termination time increases significantly as the control parameter approaches values for which a single spiral wave is stable. In addition, we find that it is also possible to have intermittently present quasi-stable spiral waves in part of the computational domain while the remainder of the domain exhibits SDC. Our results may have implications for clinical atrial fibrillation, which often shows intermittency, switching back-and-forth between fibrillation and normal sinus rhythm.