Kinematic Equations for Front Motion and Spiral-Wave Nucleation

Abstract

We present a new set of kinematic equations for front motion in bistable media. The equations extend earlier kinematic approaches by coupling the front curvature with the order parameter associated with a parity breaking front bifurcation. In addition to naturally describing the core region of rotating spiral waves the equations can be be used to study the nucleation of spiral-wave pairs along uniformly propagating fronts. The analysis of spiral-wave nucleation reduces to the simpler problem of droplet, or domain, nucleation in one space dimension.

8 pages. Aric Hagberg: http://cnls.lanl.gov/~aric; Ehud Meron: http://www.bgu.ac.il/BIDR/research/staff/meron.html