Nonlinear Wave Processes In Excitable Media

Proceedings of a NATO ARW held in Leeds, UK, September 11-15, 1989

TIlis volume contains the contributions to the Euromech Colloquium No. 241 on Nonlinear Waves in Active Media at the Institute of Cybernetics of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Tallinn, Estonia, USSR, September 27-30, 1988. The Co-chairmen of the Euromech Colloquium felt that it would be a good service to the community to publish these proceedings. First, the topic itself dealing with various wave processes with energy influx is extremely interesting and attracted a much larger number of participants than usual - a clear sign of its importance to the scientific community. Second, Euromech No. 241 was actually the first Euromech Colloquium held in the Soviet Union and could thus be viewed as a milestone in the extending scientific contacts between East and West. At the colloquium 50 researchers working in very different branches of sci ence met to lecture on their results and to discuss problems of common interest. An introductory paper by I. Engelbrecht presents the common motivation and background of the topics covered. Altogether 36 speakers presented their lectures, of which 30 are gathered here. The remaining six papers which will appear elsewhere are listed on page X. In addition, three contributions by authors who could not attend the colloquium are included. The two lectures given by A.S. Mikhailov, V.S. Davydov and V.S. Zykov are here published as one long paper.

This book covers the numerical investigation of non-linear wave processes in various media including incompressible fluids, liquids with gas bubbles, rarefied and dense plasmas, and superdense matter of neuron stars. Chapters provide clear descriptions and details of the practical applications of mathematical models, effective numerical algorithms and physical results.

This book brings together a comprehensive account of major developments in the theory and applications of nonlinear dispersive waves, nonlinear water waves, KdV and nonlinear Schrodinger equations, Davey-Stewartson equation, Benjamin-Ono equation and nonlinear instability phenomena. In order to give the book a wider readership, chapters have been written by internationally known researchers who have made significant contributions to nonlinear waves and nonlinear instability. This volume will be invaluable to applied mathematicians, physicists, geophysicists, oceanographers, engineering scientists, and to anyone interested in nonlinear dynamics.

Computing in Nonlinear Media and Automata Collectives presents an account of new ways to design massively parallel computing devices in advanced mathematical models, such as cellular automata and lattice swarms, from unconventional materials, including chemical solutions, bio-polymers, and excitable media.

In 438 alphabetically-arranged essays, this work provides a useful overview of the core mathematical background for nonlinear science, as well as its applications to key problems in ecology and biological systems, chemical reaction-diffusion problems, geophysics, economics, electrical and mechanical oscillations in engineering systems, lasers and nonlinear optics, fluid mechanics and turbulence, and condensed matter physics, among others.

Nonlinear Waves in Elastic Media explores the theoretical results of one-dimensional nonlinear waves, including shock waves, in elastic media. It is the first book to provide an in-depth and comprehensive presentation of the nonlinear wave theory while taking anisotropy effects into account. The theory is completely worked out and draws on 15 years of research by the authors, one of whom also wrote the 1965 classic Magnetohydrodynamics. Nonlinear Waves in Elastic Media emphasizes the behavior of quasitransverse waves and analyzes arbitrary discontinuity disintegration problems, illustrating that the solution can be non-unique - a surprising result. The solution is shown to be especially interesting when anisotropy and nonlinearity effects interact, even in small-amplitude waves. In addition, the text contains an independent mathematical chapter describing general methods to study hyperbolic systems expressing the conservation laws. The theoretical results described in Nonlinear Waves in Elastic Media allow, for the first time, discovery and interpretation of many new peculiarities inherent to the general problem of discontinuous solutions and so provide a valuable resource for advanced students and researchers involved with continuum mechanics and partial differential equations.