A Universal β = 4 Log-Periodic Precursor to Atrial Fibrillation

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is usually understood as the end result of growing electrical disorder in the heart. The transition into AF is therefore commonly treated as a stochastic process: rhythm becomes increasingly irregular until fibrillation begins. In that framework, the small fluctuations preceding onset are usually treated as noise. The present study tests a different possibility: that part of this apparent noise is structured. Unified Substrate Theory (UST) predicts that systems approaching critical transitions can carry discrete oscillatory corrections in logarithmic time, with a fundamental angular log-frequency β = 4 and higher harmonic modes at β = 9, 16, 27.14, and beyond. The present work tests the fundamental mode.