Annihilation of turbulence in excitable systems using pulses that inhibit activator growth

We consider turbulence consisting of erratically moving wave pieces in excitable systems. We investigate three such systems: numerical solutions of the Bär–Eiswirth model, a quasi-two-dimensional experimental setup for the Belousov–Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction in a coarse-grained medium, and a three-dimensional experimental setup for the BZ reaction in a methanol gradient. An activator-flux pulse that displaces the activator nullcline parallely to the inhibitor axis can split a wave into two waves moving in opposite directions; we show that a finite train of such pulses can completely annihilate turbulence in the three investigated systems.