Model for spiral wave formation in excitable media

Abstract
A model for the velocity of a wave front having a free edge and moving in an excitable medium is proposed. It contains three main ingredients: a curvature effect, a normal velocity profile effect at a free edge, and a finite width effect. The model allows one to study the process in which arbitrary initial conditions evolve into rotating spiral waves. Two new scaling laws, for the time to form a spiral’s core and for the distance between the cores of a mirror image pair of rotating spiral waves, are numerically derived.