Hydrodynamic limit for spatially structured interacting neurons (Q906931)

In order to construct the model one defines a Markov process and the corresponding infinitesimal generator. Terms describing chemical synapses, spike rates, electrical synapses and leak currents are incorporated in the model. The membrane potential of each neuron obeys the already classical linear ordinary differential equation. The local average potential of neuron i at time t is introduced and one focuses on the hydrodynamic limit of the process described by these potentials for all \( t \geq {0}\). The main result shows that the empirical distribution of the membrane potentials converges to a low having at each time t a probability density which is the unique solution of a specific nonlinear partial differential equation of hyperbolic type. Further the family of auxiliary processes is defined and one develops a coupling algorithm for the true and auxiliary processes. One shows that these two processes are close to each other. The hydrodynamic limit for the auxiliary process and for the true process is considered at the end of paper.