Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

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Many physical excitable media have regions of depressed excitability and in many of these systems, the interaction of waves of excitation and these regions is of the utmost interest. In the heart, regions of this nature can disrupt the normal wave of electrical excitation and trigger the onset of dangerous arrhythmias. In order to obtain insight into the effects of regions of reduced excitability, I have considered a model in which these regions are idealized as nonexcitable. In this talk, I show that the arrhythmia-generating phenomena of propagation failure and reflection occur in the model and I elucidate the dynamical mechanisms underlying these behaviors.