On the Steadily Rotating Spirals

Abstract

We study an autonomous system of two first order ordinary differential equations. This system arises from a model for steadily rotating spiral waves in excitable media. The sharply located spiral wave fronts are modeled as planar curves. Their normal velocity is assumed to depend affine linearly on curvature. The spiral tip rotates along a circle with a constant positive rotation frequency. The tip neither grows nor retracts tangentially to the curve. With rotation frequency as a parameter, we obtain the complete classification of solutions of this system. Besides providing another approach to derive the results obtained by Fiedler-Guo-Tsai for spirals with positive curvature, we also obtain many more different solutions. In particular, we obtain spiral wave solutions with sign-changing curvature and with negative curvature.