Wave-particle dualism of spiral waves dynamics

I. V. Biktasheva, V. N. Biktashev

Submitted to PRE: 2002/06/11. Accepted: 2002/12/18. Reference: Phys. Rev. E 67:026221, 2003

We demonstrate and explain a wave-particle dualism of such classical macroscopic phenomena as spiral waves in active media. That means although spiral waves appear as non-local processes involving the whole medium, they respond to small perturbations as effectively localised entities. The dualism appears as an emergent property of a nonlinear field and is mathematically expressed in terms of the spiral waves response functions, which are essentially nonzero only in the vicinity of the spiral wave core. Knowledge of the response functions allows quantitatively accurate prediction of the spiral wave drift due to small perturbations of any nature, which makes them as fundamental characteristics for spiral waves as mass is for the condensed matter.