Organizing Centers in Chemically Excitable Media

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Professor Arthur Winfree is supported by a grant from the Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to perform theoretical and experimental studies on excitable media. Excitable media are chemical systems which respond dramatically to a stimulus that exceeds some threshold. These studies have a far reaching impact on such diverse applications as: transmission of nerve impulses, heart muscle contraction including lethal arrhythmias, and burn stability in solid-fuel rockets. In the laboratory and in supercomputers Winfree studies wave geometry in excitable media whose equations are well enough known to permit critical comparison between laboratory measurements and computer simulations. In particular he studies the self-organizing behavior of such 3-dimensional media which resembles vortex ring formation in fluids. In theory, these organizing centers exist in a variety of topologically distinct forms, some of which may be dynamically stable for certain characteristic sizes. The well-known Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical reaction has been used as a synthetic model system to experimentally confirm numerically simulated results.