A pacemaker, regularly emitting chemical waves, is created out of noise when an excitable photosensitive Belousov-Zhabotinsky medium, strictly unable to autonomously initiate autowaves, is forced with a spatiotemporal patterned random illumination. These experimental observations are also reproduced numerically by using a set of reaction-diffusion equations for an activator-inhibitor model, and further analytically interpreted in terms of genuine coupling effects arising from parametric fluctuations. Within the same framework we also address situations of noise-sustained propagation in subexcitable media. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.87.078302 PACS numbers: 82.40.Bj, 05.40.Ca, 47.54. +r Since their discovery thirty years ago [1], target patterns have constituted one of the most distinctive and visually compelling examples of self-organization in chemical systems. Somewhat more general, control on wave initiation and propagation may have a wealth of potential implications not only for chemical [2][3][4] or biochemical systems [5,6], but extending to cardiology [7] or neurophysiology [8] contexts. Although unavoidably present in any realistic situation of these scenarios, the minimization of noise and disorder is always pursued under the rationale that their effects may, if not destroy, at least largely mask, the intrinsic spatiotemporal regularities of any such wave propagation phenomena. Here, contrarily, we provide experimental and numerical evidence, and also an analytical explanation, of just the opposite, now beneficial, influence, by showing that an excitable chemical system may rectify external fluctuations into regularly organized wave trains. Explicitly, we will show that the photosensitive BelousovZhabotinsky (BZ) reaction [9], under excitable conditions unable to create autowaves, does maintain a target structure when subjected to a patterned and continuously evolving random illumination.Moreover a theoretical framework for activatorinhibitor models will be proposed to interpret not only this experimental finding but the recent related one of noisesupported waves in subexcitable media [10]. With this
078302-10031-9007͞01͞ 87(7)͞078302(4)$15.00