Kinematics of rigidly rotating spiral waves

Spiral waves rigidly rotating in excitable media are studied by use of a free-boundary approach. This study reveals the selection principle which determines the shape and the rotation frequency of spiral waves in an unbounded medium with a given excitability. It is shown that a rigidly rotating spiral in a medium with a strongly reduced refractoriness is supported within a range of the medium excitability restricted by two universal limits. At the low excitability limit the spiral core radius diverges, while at the high excitability limit it vanishes. The simulations performed for the medium excitability higher than the high excitability limit reveal nonstationary rotating waves, which considerably differ from well-studied meandering spiral waves. it is shown how the proposed free-boundary approach can be extended to the case of an arbitrary refractoriness. The predictions of the free-boundary approach are in good agreement with the results from numerical Simulations of the underlying reaction-diffusion model and with asymptotics derived earlier for highly and weakly excitable media. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.