Dissipative solitons in reaction-diffusion systems

Abstract

A major goal of natural science is to understand the formation of spatiallyextended patterns in all kinds of physical, chemical, biological and other systems. In many cases, it is advantageous to interpret the overall pattern under consideration in terms of a superposition of certain spatially well-localized elementary patterns that we may refer to as “particles”. In the simplest case, all these particles are of the same kind and the complex behavior of the extended pattern can be described in terms of simple individual properties of the particles and their interaction. A clear illustrative example for this approach is the concept of atoms. In this case, the elementary pattern or particle is the atom and the complex spatially-extended pattern is, e.g., the crystal.