Relaxation oscillations in a class of delay-differential equations.

We study a class of delay differential equations which have been used to model hematological stem cell regulation and dynamics. Under certain circumstances the model exhibits self-sustained oscillations, with periods which can be significantly longer than the basic cell cycle time. We show that the long periods in the oscillations occur when the cell generation rate is small, and we provide an asymptotic analysis of the model in this case. This analysis bears a close resemblance to the analysis of relaxation oscillators (such as the Van der Pol oscillator), except that in our case the slow manifold is infinite dimensional. Despite this, a fairly complete analysis of the problem is possible

Deterministic Brownian Motion: The Effects of Perturbing a Dynamical System by a Chaotic Semi-Dynamical System

Here we review and extend central limit theorems for highly chaotic but deterministic semi-dynamical discrete time systems. We then apply these results show how Brownian motion-like results are recovered, and how an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process results within a totally deterministic framework. These results illustrate that the contamination of experimental data by "noise" may, under certain circumstances, be alternately interpreted as the signature of an underlying chaotic process.Comment: 65 pages, 8 figure