  In a weakly excitable medium, characterized by a large threshold stimulus,
the free end of an isolated broken plane wave (wave tip) can either rotate
(steadily or unsteadily) around a large excitable core, thereby producing a
spiral pattern, or retract causing the wave to vanish at boundaries. An
asymptotic analysis of spiral motion and retraction is carried out in this
weakly excitable large core regime starting from the free-boundary limit of the
reaction-diffusion models, valid when the excited region is delimited by a thin
interface. The wave description is shown to naturally split between the tip
region and a far region that are smoothly matched on an intermediate scale.
This separation allows us to rigorously derive an equation of motion for the
wave tip, with the large scale motion of the spiral wavefront slaved to the
tip. This kinematic description provides both a physical picture and exact
predictions for a wide range of wave behavior, including: (i) steady rotation
(frequency and core radius), (ii) exact treatment of the meandering instability
in the free-boundary limit with the prediction that the frequency of unstable
motion is half the primary steady frequency (iii) drift under external actions
(external field with application to axisymmetric scroll ring motion in
three-dimensions, and spatial or/and time-dependent variation of excitability),
and (iv) the dynamics of multi-armed spiral waves with the new prediction that
steadily rotating waves with two or more arms are linearly unstable. Numerical
simulations of FitzHug-Nagumo kinetics are used to test several aspects of our
results. In addition, we discuss the semi-quantitative extension of this theory
to finite cores and pinpoint mathematical subtleties related to the thin
interface limit of singly diffusive reaction-diffusion models.
