Motion of spiral tip driven by local forcing in excitable media.

We study the motion of a spiral wave controlled by a local periodic forcing imposed on a region around the spiral tip in an excitable medium. Three types of trajectories of spiral tip are observed: the epicycloid-like meandering, the resonant drift, and the hypocycloid-like meandering. The frequency of the spiral is sensitive to the local periodic forcing. The dependency of spiral frequency on the amplitude and size of local periodic forcing are presented. In addition, we show how the drift speed and direction are adjusted by the amplitude and phase of local periodic forcing, which is consistent with a theoretical analysis based on the weak deformation approximation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]