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Published on: February 8, 2011
Homoclinic bifurcation in a Hodgkin-Huxley model of thermally sensitive neurons
Ulrike Feudel1, Alexander Neiman, Xing Pei
1Department of Physics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam 14415, Germany.
Abstract:
We study global bifurcations of the chaotic attractor in a modified Hodgkin-Huxley model of thermally sensitive neurons. The control parameter for this model is the temperature. The chaotic behavior is realized over a wide range of temperatures and is visualized using interspike intervals. We observe an abrupt increase of the interspike intervals in a certain temperature region. We identify this as a homoclinic bifurcation of a saddle-focus fixed point which is embedded in the chaotic attractors. The transition is accompanied by intermittency, which obeys a universal scaling law for the average length of trajectory segments exhibiting only short interspike intervals with the distance from the onset of intermittency. We also present experimental results of interspike interval measurements taken from the crayfish caudal photoreceptor, which qualitatively demonstrate the same bifurcation structure. (c) 2000 American Institute of Physics.
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