Magnetic Field Effect in a Two-dimensional Array of Short Josephson Junctions

We study analytically the effect of a constant magnetic field on the dynamics of a two dimensional Josephson array. The magnetic field induces spatially dependent states and coupling between rows, even in the absence of an external load. Numerical simulations support these conclusions

Cortical response to the natural speech envelope correlates with neuroimaging evidence of cognition in severe brain injury

Recent studies identify severely brain-injured patients with limited or no behavioral responses who successfully perform functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or electroencephalogram (EEG) mental imagery tasks [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Such tasks are cognitively demanding [1]; accordingly, recent studies support that fMRI command following in brain-injured patients associates with preserved cerebral metabolism and preserved sleep-wake EEG [5, 6]. We investigated the use of an EEG response that tracks the natural speech envelope (NSE) of spoken language [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22] in healthy controls and brain-injured patients (vegetative state to emergence from minimally conscious state). As audition is typically preserved after brain injury, auditory paradigms may be preferred in searching for covert cognitive function [23, 24, 25]. NSE measures are obtained by cross-correlating EEG with the NSE. We compared NSE latencies and amplitudes with and without consideration of fMRI assessments. NSE latencies showed significant and progressive delay across diagnostic categories. Patients who could carry out fMRI-based mental imagery tasks showed no statistically significant difference in NSE latencies relative to healthy controls; this subgroup included patients without behavioral command following. The NSE may stratify patients with severe brain injuries and identify those patients demonstrating “cognitive motor dissociation” (CMD) [26] who show only covert evidence of command following utilizing neuroimaging or electrophysiological methods that demand high levels of cognitive function. Thus, the NSE is a passive measure that may provide a useful screening tool to improve detection of covert cognition with fMRI or other methods and improve stratification of patients with disorders of consciousness in research studies

Manifestation of Chaos in Real Complex Systems: Case of Parkinson's Disease

In this chapter we present a new approach to the study of manifestations of chaos in real complex system. Recently we have achieved the following result. In real complex systems the informational measure of chaotic chatacter (IMC) can serve as a reliable quantitative estimation of the state of a complex system and help to estimate the deviation of this state from its normal condition. As the IMC we suggest the statistical spectrum of the non-Markovity parameter (NMP) and its frequency behavior. Our preliminary studies of real complex systems in cardiology, neurophysiology and seismology have shown that the NMP has diverse frequency dependence. It testifies to the competition between Markovian and non-Markovian, random and regular processes and makes a crossover from one relaxation scenario to the other possible. On this basis we can formulate the new concept in the study of the manifestation of chaoticity. We suggest the statistical theory of discrete non-Markov stochastic processes to calculate the NMP and the quantitative evaluation of the IMC in real complex systems. With the help of the IMC we have found out the evident manifestation of chaosity in a normal (healthy) state of the studied system, its sharp reduction in the period of crises, catastrophes and various human diseases. It means that one can appreciably improve the state of a patient (of any system) by increasing the IMC of the studied live system. The given observation creates a reliable basis for predicting crises and catastrophes, as well as for diagnosing and treating various human diseases, Parkinson's disease in particular.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables. To be published in "The Logistic Map and the Route to Chaos: From the Beginnings to the Modern Applications", eds. by M. Ausloos, M. Dirickx, pp. 175-196, Springer-Verlag, Berlin (2006

Disorder and Synchronization in a Josephson Junction Plaquette

We describe the effects of disorder on the coherence properties of a 2 x 2 array of Josephson junctions (a plaquette ). The disorder is introduced through variations in the junction characteristics. We show that the array will remain one-to-one frequency locked despite large amounts of the disorder, and determine analytically the maximum disorder that can be tolerated before a transition to a desynchronized state occurs. Connections with larger N x M arrays are also drawn

Geometrical Properties of Coupled Oscillators at Synchronization

We study the synchronization of $N$ nearest neighbors coupled oscillators in a ring. We derive an analytic form for the phase difference among neighboring oscillators which shows the dependency on the periodic boundary conditions. At synchronization, we find two distinct quantities which characterize four of the oscillators, two pairs of nearest neighbors, which are at the border of the clusters before total synchronization occurs. These oscillators are responsible for the saddle node bifurcation, of which only two of them have a phase-lock of phase difference equals $\pm$$\pi$/2. Using these properties we build a technique based on geometric properties and numerical observations to arrive to an exact analytic expression for the coupling strength at full synchronization and determine the two oscillators that have a phase-lock condition of $\pm$$\pi$/2.Comment: accepted for publication in "Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulations

Impurity-induced stabilization of solitons in arrays of parametrically driven nonlinear oscillators

Chains of parametrically driven, damped pendula are known to support soliton-like clusters of in-phase motion which become unstable and seed spatiotemporal chaos for sufficiently large driving amplitudes. We show that the pinning of the soliton on a "long" impurity (a longer pendulum) expands dramatically its stability region whereas "short" defects simply repel solitons producing effective partition of the chain. We also show that defects may spontaneously nucleate solitons.Comment: 4 pages in RevTeX; 7 figures in ps forma

Emergent global oscillations in heterogeneous excitable media: The example of pancreatic beta cells

Using the standard van der Pol-FitzHugh-Nagumo excitable medium model I demonstrate a novel generic mechanism, diversity, that provokes the emergence of global oscillations from individually quiescent elements in heterogeneous excitable media. This mechanism may be operating in the mammalian pancreas, where excitable beta cells, quiescent when isolated, are found to oscillate when coupled despite the absence of a pacemaker region.Comment: See home page http://lec.ugr.es/~julya

Two and three-dimensional oscillons in nonlinear Faraday resonance

We study 2D and 3D localised oscillating patterns in a simple model system exhibiting nonlinear Faraday resonance. The corresponding amplitude equation is shown to have exact soliton solutions which are found to be always unstable in 3D. On the contrary, the 2D solitons are shown to be stable in a certain parameter range; hence the damping and parametric driving are capable of suppressing the nonlinear blowup and dispersive decay of solitons in two dimensions. The negative feedback loop occurs via the enslaving of the soliton's phase, coupled to the driver, to its amplitude and width.Comment: 4 pages; 1 figur