Tracking waves and vortex nucleation in excitable systems with anomalous dispersion.

We report experimental results obtained from a chemical reaction-diffusion system in which wave propagation is limited to a finite band of wavelengths and in which no solitary pulses exist. Wave patterns increase their size through repeated annihilation events of the frontier pulse that allow the succeeding pulses to advance farther. A related type of wave dynamics involves a stable but slow frontier pulse that annihilates subsequent waves in front-to-back collisions. These so-called merging dynamics give rise to an unexpected form of spiral wave nucleation. All of these phenomena are reproduced by a simple, three-species reaction-diffusion model that reveals the importance of the underlying anomalous dispersion relation.