Nonlocal control of pulse propagation in excitable media

Abstract

We study the effects of nonlocal control of pulse propagation in excitable media. As ageneric example for an excitable medium the FitzHugh-Nagumo model with diffusion in theactivator variable is considered. Nonlocal coupling in form of an integral term with aspatial kernel is added. We find that the nonlocal coupling modifies the propagatingpulses of the reaction-diffusion system such that a variety of spatio-temporal patternsare generated including acceleration, deceleration, suppression, or generation of pulses,multiple pulses, and blinking pulse trains. It is shown that one can observe these effectsfor various choices of the integral kernel and the coupling scheme, provided that thecontrol strength and spatial extension of the integral kernel is appropriate. In addition,an analytical procedure is developed to describe the stability borders of the spatiallyhomogeneous steady state in control parameter space in dependence on the parameters of thenonlocal coupling.