H. Dierckx, H. Verschelde, \"O. Selsil, V. N. Biktashev,
Submitted to PRL: 2012/06/28. Accepted: 2012/09/24. Published: 2012/10/23 as PRL 109(17):174102
A scroll wave in a sufficiently thin layer of an excitable medium with negative filament tension can be stable nevertheless due to filament rigidity. Above a certain critical thickness of the medium, such scroll wave will have a tendency to deform into a buckled, precessing state. Experimentally this will be seen as meandering of the spiral wave on the surface, the amplitude of which grows with the thickness of the layer, until a break-up to scroll wave turbulence happens. We present a simplified theory for this phenomenon and illustrate it with numerical examples.
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