Universal scaling of wave propagation failure in arrays of coupled nonlinear cells

We study the onset of the propagation failure of wave fronts in systems of coupled cells. We introduce a new method to analyze the scaling of the crit ical external field at which fronts cease to propagate, as a function of in tercellular coupling. We find the universal scaling of the field throughout the range of couplings and show that the field becomes exponentially small for large couplings. Our method is generic and applicable to a wide class of cellular dynamics in chemical, biological, and engineering systems. We c onfirm our results by direct numerical simulations