Noise-induced wave nucleations in an excitable chemical reaction

Abstract

We study both experimentally and numerically the temporal coherence of noise-induced wave nucleations in excitable media subjected to external fluctuations with finite correlation time. The experiments are performed with the light-sensitive variant of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction forced by an exponentially correlated dichotomous fluctuating illumination. We find that there exists an optimal correlation time for which nucleations coherence reaches a maximum. The same behavior is obtained in numerical simulations with a stochastic Oregonator model, modified to describe the light-sensitive BZ reaction.