Phase Resetting of the Pinned Pair of Spirals through Transient Chaotic Dynamics in a Chemical Reaction-Diffusion System

Excitable chemical reaction-diffusion systems show complex spatiotemporal nonlinear dynamical behaviors. Utilizing the ferroin-catalyzed BZ medium, we characterized the collective dynamics of spiral waves through experimental imaging and numerical simulations with a modified Oregonator model. Here, in this article, we report the emergence of self-regulatory behavior in a Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) medium, where the spirals are pinned to spherical heterogeneity, lose initial phase synchronization on imposition of a perturbation through a mild concentration gradient imposed internally with cation exchange resin beads, which further recovers to achieve an adaptive lag synchronized state through the transient chaotic dynamics. This is loosely analogous to the homeostasis-like behavior. This work advances the mechanistic understanding of nonlinear chemical dynamics and explores the competition between the internal gradient and coupling strength to build an adaptive intelligent system that can be applied to designing chemically driven self-healing systems, error correction in unconventional computing, and many other disciplines.