Response to sub-threshold stimulus is enhanced by spatially heterogeneous activity

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that sub-threshold stimuli can influence spatially heterogeneous activity by altering recovery dynamics, reducing waveback velocity, and potentially terminating all activity, including chaos, through analytical conditions.

Contribution

It reveals how sub-threshold stimuli can modulate activity in media by modifying recovery dynamics, a novel insight into controlling complex spatiotemporal behavior.

Findings

Sub-threshold stimuli can significantly reduce waveback velocity.

Analytical conditions for activity termination are derived.

Potential to control spatiotemporal chaos using sub-threshold stimuli.

Abstract

Sub-threshold stimuli cannot initiate excitations in active media, but surprisingly as we show in this paper, they can alter the time-evolution of spatially heterogeneous activity by modifying the recovery dynamics. This results in significant reduction of waveback velocity which may lead to spatial coherence, terminating all activity in the medium including spatiotemporal chaos. We analytically derive model-independent conditions for which such behavior can be observed.