Copyright © 2009 Robert Artebrant. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We study Hopf bifurcation solutions to the Monodomain model equipped with FitzHugh-Nagumo cell dynamics. This reaction-diffusion system plays an important role in the field of electrocardiology as a tractable mathematical model of the electrical activity in the human heart. In our setting the (bounded) spatial domain consists of two subdomains: a collection of automatic cells surrounded by collections of normal cells. Thus, the cell model features a discontinuous coefficient. Analytical techniques are applied to approximate the time-periodic solution that arises at the Hopf bifurcation point. Accurate numerical experiments are employed to complement our findings.