Event

Spatio-temporal patterns in nonlinear oscillatory and excitable media have been studied extensively in systems lacking conserved quantities. More recently, pattern formation of conserved fields has come into focus, including mass-conserving reaction--diffusion systems and viscoelastic active gels. Models for these systems can be mapped onto a minimal non-reciprocal Cahn--Hilliard (NRCH) model, that can be seen as a spatially extended generalization of the FitzHugh--Nagumo model, providing a generic model for the emergence of temporal order in non-reciprocally coupled systems with conserved fields. In this talk I will review these recent findings and will show that the minimal NRCH model exhibits a surprisingly rich set of behaviors, including a new mechanism for interrupted coarsening that does not select a preferred wavelength and transversal undulations of wavefronts in two dimensions.