32,020 research outputs found
Coverage, Continuity and Visual Cortical Architecture
The primary visual cortex of many mammals contains a continuous
representation of visual space, with a roughly repetitive aperiodic map of
orientation preferences superimposed. It was recently found that orientation
preference maps (OPMs) obey statistical laws which are apparently invariant
among species widely separated in eutherian evolution. Here, we examine whether
one of the most prominent models for the optimization of cortical maps, the
elastic net (EN) model, can reproduce this common design. The EN model
generates representations which optimally trade of stimulus space coverage and
map continuity. While this model has been used in numerous studies, no
analytical results about the precise layout of the predicted OPMs have been
obtained so far. We present a mathematical approach to analytically calculate
the cortical representations predicted by the EN model for the joint mapping of
stimulus position and orientation. We find that in all previously studied
regimes, predicted OPM layouts are perfectly periodic. An unbiased search
through the EN parameter space identifies a novel regime of aperiodic OPMs with
pinwheel densities lower than found in experiments. In an extreme limit,
aperiodic OPMs quantitatively resembling experimental observations emerge.
Stabilization of these layouts results from strong nonlocal interactions rather
than from a coverage-continuity-compromise. Our results demonstrate that
optimization models for stimulus representations dominated by nonlocal
suppressive interactions are in principle capable of correctly predicting the
common OPM design. They question that visual cortical feature representations
can be explained by a coverage-continuity-compromise.Comment: 100 pages, including an Appendix, 21 + 7 figure
Excitation of travelling multibreathers in anharmonic chains
We study the dynamics of the "externally" forced and damped Fermi-Pasta-Ulam
(FPU) 1D lattice. The forcing has the spatial symmetry of the Fourier mode with
wavenumber p and oscillates sinusoidally in time with the frequency omega. When
omega is in the phonon band, the p-mode becomes modulationally unstable above a
critical forcing, which we determine analytically in terms of the parameters of
the system. For omega above the phonon band, the instability of the p-mode
leads to the formation of a travelling multibreather, that, in the
low-amplitude limit could be described in terms of soliton solutions of a
suitable driven-damped nonlinear Schroedinger (NLS) equation. Similar
mechanisms of instability could show up in easy-axis magnetic structures, that
are governed by such NLS equations.Comment: To appear in Physica D (2002
Helmholtz bright spatial solitons and surface waves at power-law optical interfaces
We consider arbitrary-angle interactions between spatial solitons and the planar boundary between two optical materials with a single power-law nonlinear refractive index. Extensive analysis has uncovered a wide range of new qualitative phenomena in non-Kerr regimes. A universal Helmholtz-Snell law describing soliton refraction is derived using exact solutions to the governing equation as a nonlinear basis. New predictions are tested through exhaustive computations, which have uncovered substantially enhanced Goos-Hänchen shifts at some non-Kerr interfaces. Helmholtz nonlinear surface waves are analyzed theoretically, and their stability properties are investigated numerically for the first time. Interactions between surface waves and obliquely-incident solitons are also considered. Novel solution behaviours have been uncovered, which depend upon a complex interplay between incidence angle, medium mismatch parameters, and the power-law nonlinearity exponent
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