Stabilizing meandering scroll waves and ordering scroll wave turbulence by a circularly polarized electric field in highly excitable media

Abstract

Scroll waves could demonstrate meandering behaviors and even break up into scroll wave turbulence. Significantly differing from the instability induced by negative filament tension occurring often in weakly excitable media, breakup of scroll waves in highly excitable media typically involves the interaction of fronts with refractory tail of the wave. How to stabilize scroll waves and suppress scroll wave turbulence caused by such a mechanism is understudied as previous works are largely limited to the case of the negative filament tension. Here we perform a computational study to show that application of a circularly polarized electric field in highly excitable media could not only effectively force a meandering scroll wave to a rigidly rotating one via a phase-locking mechanism, but also prevent breakup of scroll waves and convert scroll wave turbulence to stable rotating scroll waves. The application of our findings in chemical systems is also discussed.