Traveling pulses of coupled Fitzhugh-Nagumo equations with doubly-diffusive effect (Q6094881)

In this paper, the authors develop a coupled FitzHugh-Nagumo equation by incorporating time delay and doubly-diffusive effects into the classical coupled FHN equations. Time delay plays an important role in FHN equations, especially in the rate and distribution of activation and inhibition for neurons. The addition of time delay leads to the existence of two small parameters, resulting in the corresponding traveling system having three time scales. The doubly-diffusion terms illustrate the different rate for two agents or neurons. The combination of doubly-diffusion terms and time delay has practical significance for the discussion of FHN equations and may be more challenging in research compared to the fast-slow system. The authors investigate the traveling pulses of coupled FitzHugh-Nagumo equation. The main analysis relies on the geometric singular perturbation theory and Exchange Lemma. More precisely, they first introduce preliminaries involving Fenichel theory for three time scale systems, and then analyze the limit dynamics of the coupled FHN equation and establish the existence of singular orbits in the traveling wave framework by means of phase space analysis. Finally, they prove the existence of traveling pulses.