Subcritical Hopf Bifurcations in the FitzHugh-Nagumo Model

Abstract: It had been shown that the transition from a rigidly rotating spiral wave to a meandering spiral wave is via a Hopf bifurcation. Many studies have shown that these bifurcations are supercritical, but we present numerical studies which show that subcritical bifurcations are also present within FitzHugh-Nagumo. Furthermore, we present a evidence that this bifurcation is highly sensitive to initial conditions, and it is possible to convert one solution in the hysteresis loop to the other.