Efficient control of spiral wave location in an excitable medium with localized heterogeneities

We show that a spiral wave core can be guided by feedback control through a two-dimensional (2D) medium along a virtual 1D detector of given shape. To this aim, short perturbations of excitability are applied globally to the medium each time the spiral wave front is tangent to the detector, or touches its open ends. This relatively simple and robust feedback algorithm is realized in experiments with the light-sensitive Belousov–Zhabotinsky (BZ) medium and in numerical simulations of the underlying Oregonator model. A theory is developed that reduces the description of the spiral wave drift to an iterated map from which the drift velocity field for the motion of the spiral core can be obtained. This drift velocity field predicts both the transient as well as the stationary trajectories of the drifting spiral waves in good agreement with experimental and numerical data. It is shown that the drift velocity is limited by instabilities which arise under high perturbation strength or large delay time. We propose a method to suppress the observed instabilities in order to increase the velocity of feedback mediated resonant drift. Our results might be useful for the control of spiral wave location in a wide variety of excitable media.