DETERMINISTIC BROWNIAN-MOTION IN THE HYPERMEANDER OF SPIRAL WAVES

We explain the phenomenon of hypermeander of spiral waves, observed in numerical experiments with various models of excitable media, as a ch aotic attractor in the quotient system with respect to the Euclidean g roup. Such an attractor should lead to a motion of the spiral wave tip analogous to that of a Brownian particle, with mean square of displac ement of the tip growing linearly at large times. This prediction is c onfirmed by numerical experiments with hypermeandering spiral waves. C opyright (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.