What makes your heart beat regularly or go out of control? Can chemical reactions change colors continuously? What happens when you burn a candle at both ends? Why can't we predict the weather more than a few days in advance?

Excitable systems are found throughout nature and have three main properties that can be illustrated through a canonical example, a forest fire.

Behavior threshold (no fire occurs without a sufficiently large stimulus like a lightning strike or initial blaze set by a camper).
Wave propagation without damping (the fire continues to spread to any nearby unburned trees).
Recovery period (the forest must regrow before another fire can occur).

Numerous biological and physical systems are excitable, with perhaps the most famous examples being cardiac and neural cells. Related oscillatory systems exhibit similar properties but produce their own stimuli without the need for an external perturbation

This workshop focuses on understanding the electrical properties of the heart. Individual cardiac cells are excitable and support propagation of electrical signals, which trigger contraction. Disruptions of this signaling can lead to serious health issues but also demonstrate interesting dynamics, including period-doubling bifurcations and formation of interesting patterns like spiral waves. Along the way, we will study simpler physical systems that show similar behavior and use these systems as a gateway to building understanding of the physics and mathematics that can describe such systems.

The workshop will alternate lectures with laboratory and collaborative exercises involving discussion, group work, experiments with physical systems, and computational modeling. In addition, participants will work in teams on a project. The teams will bring together students from multiple disciplines to assemble a diversity of backgrounds and expertise.

Instructors: Elizabeth M. Cherry (Rochester Institute of Technology) and Flavio H. Fenton (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Workshop 2017 Group Photo