Category: Nonlinear Dyn.

Summary: Testing whether crossed stripe disorder in excitability and recovery increases spiral-tip complexity and meander-area retention near the meander transition.

Excitable-media models such as FitzHugh-Nagumo can support spiral waves whose tips drift, meander, or break up depending on parameters and heterogeneity. This experiment asks whether disorder becomes especially effective when excitability and recovery vary in stripe patterns oriented along different axes rather than in parallel or as uncorrelated noise.

The simulation compares crossed stripes against iid and parallel-stripe heterogeneity near the spiral-wave meander transition. The proposed mechanism is geometric frustration: orthogonal disorder fields can keep the spiral tip from locking onto a single preferred propagation direction, thereby increasing trajectory complexity and preserving a larger meander area.

That framing goes beyond asking whether heterogeneity matters at all. It isolates a specific interaction between two structured disorder fields and tests whether crossed anisotropy changes spiral dynamics in a way simpler disorder patterns do not.

Method: GPU-accelerated FitzHugh-Nagumo simulations comparing crossed, parallel, and IID heterogeneity in excitability and recovery timescale near the spiral-meander transition.

What is measured: Tip-trajectory complexity, meander-area retention, directional alignment, and comparative performance of crossed versus IID and parallel stripe disorder.