Chemical Diodes Built with Controlled Excitable Media

摘要

Excitable reaction-diffusion medium can be used for processing information coded in pulses of excitation. Unidirectional propagation (signal rectification) is observed even in very simple geometrical configurations of excitable chemical media where the asymmetry is embedded not in the geometrical structure but just in the difference of excitability between neighbouring channels. Here we demonstrate that a chemical signal diode can process signals composed of a number of excitation pulses in an interesting and complex way. Properties of the proposed diode has been tested both in numerical simulations and in experiments with Ru-catalyzed Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction.