Tanaka Masanobu, Nagahara Hiroki, Kitahata Hiroyuki, Krinsky Valentin, Agladze Konstantin, Yoshikawa Kenichi
Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan.
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2007 Jul;76(1 Pt 2):016205. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.76.016205. Epub 2007 Jul 10.
Excitable media show changes in their basic characteristics that reflect temporal changes in the environment. In the photosensitive Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction, excitability is decreased by illumination. We found that a traveling pulse failed to propagate when a certain level of light intensity was switched on abruptly, but the pulse continued propagating when the light intensity reached the same level gradually. We investigated the mechanism of adaptation of pulse propagation to the change in light intensity using two mathematical models, the Oregonator model (a specific model for the photosensitive BZ reaction), and the FitzHugh-Nagumo model (a generic model for excitable media). The appearance of a characteristic such as adaptation is shown to be a general feature for a traveling pulse in excitable media.
