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Updated: May 18, 2026

Investigating Outer Hair Cell Motility with a Combination of External Alternating Electrical Field Stimulation and High-speed Image Analysis
Published on: July 18, 2011
Mode-locking dynamics of hair cells of the inner ear
Lea Fredrickson-Hemsing1, Seung Ji, Robijn Bruinsma
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, California NanoSystems Institute, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90024, USA.
Abstract:
We explore mode locking of spontaneous oscillations of saccular hair cell bundles to periodic mechanical deflections. A simple dynamic systems framework is presented that captures the main features of the experimentally observed behavior in the form of an Arnold tongue. We propose that the phase-locking transition can proceed via different bifurcations. At low stimulus amplitudes F, the transition to mode locking as a function of the stimulus frequency ω has the character of a saddle-node bifurcation on an invariant circle. At higher stimulus amplitudes, the mode-locking transition has the character of a supercritical Andronov-Hopf bifurcation.
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