On bifurcations in a chaotically stirred excitable medium

We study a one-dimensional filamental model of a chaotically stirred excitable medium. In a numerical simulation we systematically explore its rich bifurcation scenarios involving saddle–nodes, Hopf bifurcations and hysteresis loops. The bifurcations are described in terms of two parameters signifying the excitability of the reacting medium and the strength of the chaotic stirring, respectively. The solution behaviour, in particular at the bifurcation points, is analytically described by means of a nonperturbative variational method. Using this method we reduce the partial differential equations to either algebraic equations for stationary solutions and bifurcations, or to ordinary differential equations in the case of non-stationary solutions and bifurcations. We present numerical simulations corroborating our analytical results.