Plane wave speed in discrete excitable media with recovery

The authors study the effect of the usual recovery process in an excitable medium on the plane wave propagation speed in a discrete model of the medium. The effects of recovery are simulated by decreasing the element's sourcing strength (its ability to excite neighboring elements) with increasing recovery time. The authors derived the dependence of the plane wave speed on the excitation threshold and recovery time constant and found that this relation was remarkably similar to the analogous dependence calculated for typical reaction-diffusion models of continuous media.