V.N.Biktashev, I.V.Biktasheva, A.V.Holden, M.A.Tsyganov, J.Brindley , N.A.Hill
Submitted to JoBP 1998/07/31. Accepted 1999/01/19
If an excitable medium is moving with relative shear, the waves of excitation may be broken by the motion. We consider such breaks for the case of a constant linear shear flow. The mechanisms and conditions for the breaking of solitary waves and wavetrains are essentially different: the solitary waves require the velocity gradient to exceed a certain threshold, whilst the breaking of repetitive wavetrains happens for arbitrarily small velocity gradients. Since broken waves evolve into new spiral wave sources, this leads to spatio-temporal irregularity.
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