He-Ping Ying’s research while affiliated with Zhejiang University and other places

The dynamics of a scroll wave in an excitable medium with gradient excitability is studied in detail. Three parameter regimes can be distinguished by the degree of gradient. For a small gradient, the system reaches a simple rotating synchronization. In this regime, the rigid rotating velocity of spiral waves is maximal in the layers with the highest filament twist. As the excitability gradient increases, the scroll wave evolutes into a meandering synchronous state. This transition is accompanied by a variation in twisting rate. Filament twisting may prevent the breakup of spiral waves in the bottom layers with a low excitability with which a spiral breaks in a 2D medium. When the gradient is large enough, the twisted filament breaks up, which results in a semi-turbulent state where the lower part is turbulent while the upper part contains a scroll wave with a low twisting filament.

In a generic model of excitable media, we study the behavior of spiral waves interacting with obstacles and their dynamics under the influences of simple periodic mechanical deformation (PMD). Depending on the characteristics of the obstacles, i.e., size and excitability, the rotation of a pinned spiral wave shows different scenarios, e.g., embedding into or anchoring on an obstacle. Three different drift phenomena induced by PMD are observed: scattering on small partial-excitable obstacles, meander-induced unpinning on big partial-excitable obstacles, and drifting around small unexcitable obstacles. Their underlying mechanisms are discussed. The dependence of the threshold amplitude of PMD on the characteristics of the obstacles to successfully remove pinned spiral waves on big partial-excitable obstacles is studied.

Electron injection into the wakefield of an intense short laser pulse by a weaker laser pulse propagating in the opposite direction is reconsidered using two-dimensional (2D) particle-in-cell simulations as well as analytical modeling. It is found that for linearly polarized lasers the injection efficiency and the quality of the wakefield accelerated electrons increase with the intensity of the injection laser only up to a certain level, and then decreases. Theory and simulation tracking test electrons originally in the beat region of the two laser pulses show that the reduction of the injection efficiency at high injection-laser intensities is caused by stochastic overheating of the affected electrons. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.

Spiral waves may be pinned to anatomical heterogeneities in the cardiac tissue, which leads to monomorphic ventricular tachycardia. Wave emission from heterogeneities (WEH) induced by electric pulses in one direction (EP) is a promising method for liberating such waves by using heterogeneities as internal virtual pacing sites. Here, based on the WEH effect, a new mechanism of liberation by means of a rotating electric pulse (REP) is proposed in a generic model of excitable media. Compared with the EP, the REP has the advantage of opening wider time window to liberate pinned spiral. The influences of rotating direction and frequency of the REP, and the radius of the obstacles on this new mechanism are studied. We believe this strategy may improve manipulations with pinned spiral waves in heart experiments.

Based on a reactive multiple particle collision method, we construct a mesoscopic dynamics model to simulate chemical system. The validity of the reactive multiple particle collision method under various conditions in a double-feedback bi-stable chemical system is studied. Then, we extend it to simulate diffusion-limited reactions with fast reaction rate in cellular environment. Using the improved method, we observe bi-stable behavior with randomly distributed reactants and spatial domain separation of opposite phases. The particle-based mesoscopic method is computationally efficient, although hydrodynamic interactions and fluctuation are both properly accounted for. Stochastic effects shown to play dominant roles in biochemical dynamics are also considered. The improved method could be used to explore a variety of reactions with disparate scale of reaction rates.

The collision of wake bubbles behind two counterpropagating laser pulses in rarefied plasma is investigated using particle-in-cell simulation. Special attention is paid to the highly nonlinear dynamics of the electrons in the interaction region. It is found that, as the two bubbles approach each other and collide, the electrons in the interaction region first oscillate in a periodic fashion, forming a quasistationary dense electron density ripple with fairly regular spatial structure. At longer times, the electron motion becomes chaotic, and the density grating is gradually smeared. The electrons escape in the transverse direction, and eventually the two bubbles merge to form a single one. The transition of the electron motion from regular to chaotic is confirmed by analytical modeling using test electrons moving in counterpropagating planar electromagnetic waves. The findings shed light on the dynamics of wake-bubble collisions and the complex behavior induced by multiple laser pulses in plasmas.

In a generic model of excitable media, we simulate wave emission from a heterogeneity (WEH) induced by an electric field. Based on the WEH effect, a rotating electric field is proposed to terminate existed spatiotemporal turbulence. Compared with the effects resulted by a periodic pulsed electric field, the rotating electric field displays several improvements, such as lower required intensity, emitting waves on smaller obstacles, and shorter suppression time. Furthermore, due to rotation of the electric field, it can automatically source waves from the boundary of an obstacle with small curvature.

The electric activities of neurons are often affected by ion channel poisoning, in particularly, interrupting normal transduction of signals within the brain. This may be due to changes in conductance and the number of active channels. Tetraethylammonium, for example, is known to cause ion channel poisoning of potassium channels, while tetrodotoxin has similar detrimental effects on sodium channels. The occurrence of spiral waves in neuronal systems was observed frequently in the past, and it was argued that these waves of excitation may play an important role by the propagation of electric signals across the quiescent regions of the brain. In this work, the parameters and determine the ratio, with regards to the total number of ion channels, of active potassium and sodium channels, respectively, and they are taken to be representative also for the degree of channel poisoning. In the numerical studies, a well developed stable rotating spiral wave is used as the initial state to be controlled by the ion channel poisoning. We show that, under noise-free conditions, spiral waves are terminated whenever and are set lower than a given threshold. However, breakup of spiral wave occurs if the intensity of the channel noise increases. In order to quantify these observations, we use a simple but robust synchronization measure, which captures succinctly the transition from spiral waves to homogeneous neuronal activity and/or broken turbulent state. The critical thresholds can be inferred from the abrupt changes occurring in the corresponding dependencies of synchronization versus the and ratios. Furthermore, the sampled membrane potentials of a single neuron are recorded to detect the periodical spiral wave in a feasible way and the results could be dependent of the position of node (or site) to be monitored. Notably, small synchronization factors can be tightly associated to states where the formation of spiral waves is robust to channel poisoning and weak channel noise.

Inwardly rotating spirals (IRSs) have attracted great attention since their observation in an oscillatory reaction-diffusion system. However, IRSs have not yet been reported in planar excitable media. In the present work we investigate rotating waves in a nonuniform excitable medium, consisting of an inner disk part surrounded by an outer ring part with different excitabilities, by numerical simulations of a simple FitzHugh-Nagumo model. Depending on the excitability of the medium as well as the inhomogeneity, we find the occurrence of IRSs, of which the excitation propagates inwardly to the geometrical spiral tip.

We present a dynamic Monte Carlo study of the spin-1/2 quantum XY model in two-dimensions at the Kosterlitz–Thouless phase transition temperature. The short-time dynamic scaling behaviour is found and the dynamical exponents θ, z and the static exponent η are determined.