Noise-induced spatial periodicity in excitable chemical media

We show that spatiotemporal noise acting on the illumination intensity of an excitable photosensitive Belousov-Zhabotinskii medium, modelled by the diffusively coupled two-component Oregonator kinetics, is able to extract a characteristic spatial frequency of the system in a resonant manner. We emphasize that thereby the system is locally initiated from steady state excitable conditions so the observed patterns are exclusively noise induced. Thus, the reported phenomenon is a novel observation of spatial coherence resonance in excitable chemical media. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.