A numerical study of the time of extinction in a class of systems of spiking neurons (Q2677654)

This article is devoted to the numerical study of a mathematical model of spiking neurons introduced by \textit{P. A. Ferrari} et al. [J. Stat. Phys. 172, No. 6, 1564--1575 (2018; Zbl 1418.92025)]. It is assumed that we have a countable number of neurons linked together in a network, each of them having a membrane potential taking value in the integers, and each of them spiking over time at a rate which depends on the membrane potential through some rate function \(\phi\). At each of these leak times, which occur for a given neuron at a fixed rate \(\gamma\), the membrane potential of the neuron concerned is spontaneously reset to 0. It is shown that when the graph structure of the network is the one-dimensional lattice with a hard threshold for the activation function, this model presents a phase transition with respect to \(\gamma\), and that it also presents a metastable behavior. For each of the multidimensional lattices the authors investigate the effect of changing the activation function to a linear function and to a sigmoid function. A description of the algorithm used for the simulations can be found in Section 4.