UC San Diego

Spiral waves have been observed in a variety of physical, chemical, and biological systems. They play a major role in cardiac arrhythmias, including fibrillation, where the observed irregular activation patterns are generally thought to arise from the continuous breakup of multiple unstable spiral waves. Using spatially extended simulations of different electrophysiological models of cardiac tissue, we show that a single spiral wave in the presence of heterogeneities can display chaotic tip trajectories, consistent with fibrillation. We also show that the simulated spiral tip dynamics, including chaotic trajectories, can be captured by a simple particle model which only describes the dynamics of the spiral tip. This shows that spiral wave breakup, or interactions with other waves, are not necessary to initiate chaos in spiral waves.