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    Noise enhanced coupling between two oscillators with long-term plasticity
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2015) Lücken, Leonhard; Popovych, Oleksandr V.; Tass, Peter A.; Yanchuk, Serhiy
    Spike time-dependent plasticity is a fundamental adaptation mechanism of the nervous system. It induces structural changes of synaptic connectivity by regulation of coupling strengths between individual cells depending on their spiking behavior. As a biophysical process its functioning is constantly subjected to natural fluctuations. We study theoretically the influence of noise on a microscopic level by considering only two coupled neurons. Adopting a phase description for the neurons we derive a two-dimensional system which describes the averaged dynamics of the coupling strengths. We show that a multistability of several coupling configurations is possible, where some configurations are not found in systems without noise. Intriguingly, it is possible that a strong bidirectional coupling, which is not present in the noise-free situation, can be stabilized by the noise. This means that increased noise, which is normally expected to desynchronize the neurons, can be the reason for an antagonistic response of the system, which organizes itself into a state of stronger coupling and counteracts the impact of noise. This mechanism, as well as a high potential for multistability, is also demonstrated numerically for a coupled pair of Hodgkin-Huxley neurons.
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    The link between coherence echoes and mode locking
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2019) Eydam, Sebastian; Wolfrum, Matthias
    We investigate the appearance of sharp pulses in the mean field of Kuramoto-type globally- coupled phase oscillator systems. In systems with exactly equidistant natural frequencies self- organized periodic pulsations of the mean field, called mode locking, have been described re- cently as a new collective dynamics below the synchronization threshold. We show here that mode locking can appear also for frequency combs with modes of finite width, where the natu- ral frequencies are randomly chosen from equidistant frequency intervals. In contrast to that, so called coherence echoes, which manifest themselves also as pulses in the mean field, have been found in systems with completely disordered natural frequencies as the result of two consecutive stimulations applied to the system. We show that such echo pulses can be explained by a stimula- tion induced mode locking of a subpopulation representing a frequency comb. Moreover, we find that the presence of a second harmonic in the interaction function, which can lead to the global stability of the mode-locking regime for equidistant natural frequencies, can enhance the echo phenomenon significantly. The non-monotonous behavior of echo amplitudes can be explained as a result of the linear dispersion within the self-organized mode-locked frequency comb. Fi- nally we investigate the effect of small periodic stimulations on oscillator systems with disordered natural frequencies and show how the global coupling can support the stimulated pulsation by increasing the width of locking plateaus.