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Updated: May 14, 2026

Studying Large Amplitude Oscillatory Shear Response of Soft Materials
Published on: April 25, 2019
Effects of shear flows on nonlinear waves in excitable media
V N Biktashev1, I V Biktasheva, A V Holden
1School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT UK.
Abstract:
If an excitable medium is moving with relative shear, the waves of excitation may be broken by the motion. We consider such breaks for the case of a constant linear shear flow. The mechanisms and conditions for the breaking of solitary waves and wavetrains are essentially different: the solitary waves require the velocity gradient to exceed a certain threshold, whilst the breaking of repetitive wavetrains happens for arbitrarily small velocity gradients. Since broken waves evolve into new spiral wave sources, this leads to spatio-temporal irregularity.
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