Stephen Coombes

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  Waves in random neural media
  Stephen Coombes
  The propagation of waves of neural activity across the surface of the brain is known to subserve both natural and pathological neurobiological phenomena. An example of the former is spreading excitation associated with sensory processing, whilst waves in epilepsy are a classic example of the latter. There is now a long history of using integro-differential neural field models to understand the properties of such waves. For mathematical convenience these models are often assumed to be spatially translationally-invariant. However, it is hard even at a first approximation to view the brain as a homogeneous system and so there is a pressing need to develop a set of mathematical tools for the study of waves in heterogeneous media that can be used in brain modeling. Homogenization is one natural multi-scale approach that can be utilized in this regard, though as a perturbation technique it requires that modulation on the micro-scale be both small in amplitude and rapidly varying in space. In this talk I will present novel techniques that improve upon this standard approach and can further tackle cases where the inhomogeneous environment is modeled as a random process.
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  Synchrony in networks of coupled non smooth dynamical systems: Extending the master stability function
  Stephen Coombes
  The master stability function is a powerful tool for determining synchrony in high dimensional networks of coupled limit cycle oscillators. In part this approach relies on the analysis of a low dimensional variational equation around a periodic orbit. For smooth dynamical systems this orbit is not generically available in closed form. However, many models in physics, engineering, and biology admit to piece-wise linear (pwl) caricatures which are also often nonsmooth, for which it is possible to construct periodic orbits without recourse to numerical evolution of trajectories. A classic example is the McKean model of an excitable system that has been extensively studied in the mathematical neuroscience community. Understandably the master stability function cannot be immediately applied to networks of such elements if they are non-smooth. Here we show how to extend the master stability function to nonsmooth planar pwl systems, and in the process demonstrate that considerable insight into network dynamics can be obtained when choosing the dynamics of the nodes to be pwl. In illustration we highlight an inverse period-doubling route to synchrony, under variation in coupling strength, in linearly coupled networks for which the node dynamics is poised near a homoclinic bifurcation. We contrast this with node dynamics poised near a non-smooth Andronov-Hopf bifurcation and also a saddle node bifurcation of limit cycles, for which no such bifurcation of synchrony occurs.