951 research outputs found
General properties and analytical approximations of photorefractive solitons
We investigate general properties of spatial 1-dimensional bright
photorefractive solitons and suggest various analytical approximations for the
soliton profile and the half width, both depending on an intensity parameter r
Sequential Desynchronization in Networks of Spiking Neurons with Partial Reset
The response of a neuron to synaptic input strongly depends on whether or not
it has just emitted a spike. We propose a neuron model that after spike
emission exhibits a partial response to residual input charges and study its
collective network dynamics analytically. We uncover a novel desynchronization
mechanism that causes a sequential desynchronization transition: In globally
coupled neurons an increase in the strength of the partial response induces a
sequence of bifurcations from states with large clusters of synchronously
firing neurons, through states with smaller clusters to completely asynchronous
spiking. We briefly discuss key consequences of this mechanism for more general
networks of biophysical neurons
Modeling the impact of changing patient transportation systems on peri-operative process performance in a large hospital: insights from a computer simulation study
Transportation of patients is a key hospital operational activity. During a large construction project, our patient admission and prep area will relocate from immediately adjacent to the operating room suite to another floor of a different building. Transportation will require extra distance and elevator trips to deliver patients and recycle transporters (specifically: personnel who transport patients). Management intuition suggested that starting all 52 first cases simultaneously would require many of the 18 available elevators. To test this, we developed a data-driven simulation tool to allow decision makers to simultaneously address planning and evaluation questions about patient transportation. We coded a stochastic simulation tool for a generalized model treating all factors contributing to the process as JAVA objects. The model includes elevator steps, explicitly accounting for transporter speed and distance to be covered. We used the model for sensitivity analyses of the number of dedicated elevators, dedicated transporters, transporter speed and the planned process start time on lateness of OR starts and the number of cases with serious delays (i.e., more than 15 min). Allocating two of the 18 elevators and 7 transporters reduced lateness and the number of cases with serious delays. Additional elevators and/or transporters yielded little additional benefit. If the admission process produced ready-for-transport patients 20 min earlier, almost all delays would be eliminated. Modeling results contradicted clinical managers’ intuition that starting all first cases on time requires many dedicated elevators. This is explained by the principle of decreasing marginal returns for increasing capacity when there are other limiting constraints in the system.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (DMS-0732175)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CMMI-0846554)United States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-08-1-0369)Singapore-MIT AllianceMassachusetts Institute of Technology. Buschbaum Research Fund
An Analytical Approach to Neuronal Connectivity
This paper describes how realistic neuromorphic networks can have their
connectivity properties fully characterized in analytical fashion. By assuming
that all neurons have the same shape and are regularly distributed along the
two-dimensional orthogonal lattice with parameter , it is possible to
obtain the accurate number of connections and cycles of any length from the
autoconvolution function as well as from the respective spectral density
derived from the adjacency matrix. It is shown that neuronal shape plays an
important role in defining the spatial spread of network connections. In
addition, most such networks are characterized by the interesting phenomenon
where the connections are progressively shifted along the spatial domain where
the network is embedded. It is also shown that the number of cycles follows a
power law with their respective length. Morphological measurements for
characterization of the spatial distribution of connections, including the
adjacency matrix spectral density and the lacunarity of the connections, are
suggested. The potential of the proposed approach is illustrated with respect
to digital images of real neuronal cells.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure
Robust coding of flow-field parameters by axo-axonal gap junctions between fly visual interneurons
Complex flight maneuvers require a sophisticated system to exploit the optic flow resulting from moving images of the environment projected onto the retina. In the fly's visual course control center, the lobula plate, 10 so-called vertical system (VS) cells are thought to match, with their complex receptive fields, the optic flow resulting from rotation around different body axes. However, signals of single VS cells are unreliable indicators of such optic flow parameters in the context of their noisy, texture-dependent input from local motion measurements. Here we propose an alternative encoding scheme based on network simulations of biophysically realistic compartmental models of VS cells. The simulations incorporate recent data about the highly selective connectivity between VS cells consisting of an electrical axo-axonal coupling between adjacent cells and a reciprocal inhibition between the most distant cells. We find that this particular wiring performs a linear interpolation between the output signals of VS cells, leading to a robust representation of the axis of rotation even in the presence of textureless patches of the visual surround
Retinal metric: a stimulus distance measure derived from population neural responses
The ability of the organism to distinguish between various stimuli is limited
by the structure and noise in the population code of its sensory neurons. Here
we infer a distance measure on the stimulus space directly from the recorded
activity of 100 neurons in the salamander retina. In contrast to previously
used measures of stimulus similarity, this "neural metric" tells us how
distinguishable a pair of stimulus clips is to the retina, given the noise in
the neural population response. We show that the retinal distance strongly
deviates from Euclidean, or any static metric, yet has a simple structure: we
identify the stimulus features that the neural population is jointly sensitive
to, and show the SVM-like kernel function relating the stimulus and neural
response spaces. We show that the non-Euclidean nature of the retinal distance
has important consequences for neural decoding.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys Rev Let
Theory of Nonlinear Dispersive Waves and Selection of the Ground State
A theory of time dependent nonlinear dispersive equations of the Schroedinger
/ Gross-Pitaevskii and Hartree type is developed. The short, intermediate and
large time behavior is found, by deriving nonlinear Master equations (NLME),
governing the evolution of the mode powers, and by a novel multi-time scale
analysis of these equations. The scattering theory is developed and coherent
resonance phenomena and associated lifetimes are derived. Applications include
BEC large time dynamics and nonlinear optical systems. The theory reveals a
nonlinear transition phenomenon, ``selection of the ground state'', and NLME
predicts the decay of excited state, with half its energy transferred to the
ground state and half to radiation modes. Our results predict the recent
experimental observations of Mandelik et. al. in nonlinear optical waveguides
Coulomb corrections to production in ultra-relativistic nuclear collisions
The purpose of this paper is to explain the discrepancies existing in the
literature relative to pair production in peripheral heavy ion
collisions at ultra-relativistic energies. A controversial issue is the
possible cancellation of Coulomb corrections to the Born term in the pair
production cross-section. Such a cancellation has been observed in a recent
approach based on finding retarded solutions of the Dirac equation, but does
not seem to hold in a perturbative approach. We show in this paper that the two
approaches are in fact calculating different observables: the perturbative
approach gives the exclusive cross-section of single pair production, while the
other method gives the inclusive cross-section.
We have also performed a thorough study of the electron propagator in the
non-static background field of the two nuclei, the conclusion of which is that
the retarded propagator is in the ultra-relativistic limit a much simpler
object than the Feynman propagator, and can be calculated exactly.Comment: 31 pages LaTeX document, 10 postscript figures (expanded 3rd section,
version to be published in Nucl. Phys. A
- …