Chimera states in pulse coupled neural networks: The influence of dilution and noise

Abstract

We analyse the possible dynamical states emerging for two symmetrically pulse coupled populations of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons. In particular, we observe broken symmetry states in this set-up: namely, breathing chimeras, where one population is fully synchronized and the other is in a state of partial synchronization (PS) as well as generalized chimera states, where both populations are in PS, but with different levels of synchronization. Symmetric macroscopic states are also present, ranging from quasi-periodic motions, to collective chaos, from splay states to population anti-phase partial synchronization. We then investigate the influence disorder, random link removal or noise, on the dynamics of collective solutions in this model. As a result, we observe that broken symmetry chimeralike states, with both populations partially synchronized, persist up to 80% of broken links and up to noise ︠amplitudes