63 research outputs found
The New House of the Region of Hannover - Building Energy Efficient in a Public Private Partnership
Public Private Partnerships are an increasingly popular approach to carry out public infra-structure projects. PPPs aim at reducing costs and risk and improving service and quality by using private expertise and management potential
Doppler Effect of Nonlinear Waves and Superspirals in Oscillatory Media
Nonlinear waves emitted from a moving source are studied. A meandering spiral
in a reaction-diffusion medium provides an example, where waves originate from
a source exhibiting a back-and-forth movement in radial direction. The periodic
motion of the source induces a Doppler effect that causes a modulation in
wavelength and amplitude of the waves (``superspiral''). Using the complex
Ginzburg-Landau equation, we show that waves subject to a convective Eckhaus
instability can exhibit monotonous growth or decay as well as saturation of
these modulations away from the source depending on the perturbation frequency.
Our findings allow a consistent interpretation of recent experimental
observations concerning superspirals and their decay to spatio-temporal chaos.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Helicoidal instability of a scroll vortex in three-dimensional reaction-diffusion systems
We study the dynamics of scroll vortices in excitable reaction-diffusion
systems analytically and numerically. We demonstrate that intrinsic
three-dimensional instability of a straight scroll leads to the formation of
helicoidal structures. This behavior originates from the competition between
the scroll curvature and unstable core dynamics. We show that the obtained
instability persists even beyond the meander core instability of
two-dimensional spiral wave.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, revte
Markov analysis of stochastic resonance in a periodically driven integrate-fire neuron
We model the dynamics of the leaky integrate-fire neuron under periodic
stimulation as a Markov process with respect to the stimulus phase. This avoids
the unrealistic assumption of a stimulus reset after each spike made in earlier
work and thus solves the long-standing reset problem. The neuron exhibits
stochastic resonance, both with respect to input noise intensity and stimulus
frequency. The latter resonance arises by matching the stimulus frequency to
the refractory time of the neuron. The Markov approach can be generalized to
other periodically driven stochastic processes containing a reset mechanism.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figure
(0,2) Deformations of Linear Sigma Models
We study (0,2) deformations of a (2,2) supersymmetric gauged linear sigma
model for a Calabi-Yau hypersurface in a Fano toric variety. In the non-linear
sigma model these correspond to some of the holomorphic deformations of the
tangent bundle on the hypersurface. Combinatorial formulas are given for the
number of these deformations, and we show that these numbers are exchanged by
mirror symmetry in a subclass of the models.Comment: 35 pages; uses xy-fig; typos fixed, acknowledgments adde
Theory of spiral wave dynamics in weakly excitable media: asymptotic reduction to a kinematic model and applications
In a weakly excitable medium, characterized by a large threshold stimulus,
the free end of an isolated broken plane wave (wave tip) can either rotate
(steadily or unsteadily) around a large excitable core, thereby producing a
spiral pattern, or retract causing the wave to vanish at boundaries. An
asymptotic analysis of spiral motion and retraction is carried out in this
weakly excitable large core regime starting from the free-boundary limit of the
reaction-diffusion models, valid when the excited region is delimited by a thin
interface. The wave description is shown to naturally split between the tip
region and a far region that are smoothly matched on an intermediate scale.
This separation allows us to rigorously derive an equation of motion for the
wave tip, with the large scale motion of the spiral wavefront slaved to the
tip. This kinematic description provides both a physical picture and exact
predictions for a wide range of wave behavior, including: (i) steady rotation
(frequency and core radius), (ii) exact treatment of the meandering instability
in the free-boundary limit with the prediction that the frequency of unstable
motion is half the primary steady frequency (iii) drift under external actions
(external field with application to axisymmetric scroll ring motion in
three-dimensions, and spatial or/and time-dependent variation of excitability),
and (iv) the dynamics of multi-armed spiral waves with the new prediction that
steadily rotating waves with two or more arms are linearly unstable. Numerical
simulations of FitzHug-Nagumo kinetics are used to test several aspects of our
results. In addition, we discuss the semi-quantitative extension of this theory
to finite cores and pinpoint mathematical subtleties related to the thin
interface limit of singly diffusive reaction-diffusion models
Stochastic Resonance of Ensemble Neurons for Transient Spike Trains: A Wavelet Analysis
By using the wavelet transformation (WT), we have analyzed the response of an
ensemble of (=1, 10, 100 and 500) Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) neurons to {\it
transient} -pulse spike trains () with independent Gaussian noises.
The cross-correlation between the input and output signals is expressed in
terms of the WT expansion coefficients. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is
evaluated by using the {\it denoising} method within the WT, by which the noise
contribution is extracted from output signals. Although the response of a
single (N=1) neuron to sub-threshold transient signals with noises is quite
unreliable, the transmission fidelity assessed by the cross-correlation and SNR
is shown to be much improved by increasing the value of : a population of
neurons play an indispensable role in the stochastic resonance (SR) for
transient spike inputs. It is also shown that in a large-scale ensemble, the
transmission fidelity for supra-threshold transient spikes is not significantly
degraded by a weak noise which is responsible to SR for sub-threshold inputs.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure
A reafferent and feed-forward model of song syntax generation in the Bengalese finch
Adult Bengalese finches generate a variable song that obeys a distinct and individual syntax. The syntax is gradually lost over a period of days after deafening and is recovered when hearing is restored. We present a spiking neuronal network model of the song syntax generation and its loss, based on the assumption that the syntax is stored in reafferent connections from the auditory to the motor control area. Propagating synfire activity in the HVC codes for individual syllables of the song and priming signals from the auditory network reduce the competition between syllables to allow only those transitions that are permitted by the syntax. Both imprinting of song syntax within HVC and the interaction of the reafferent signal with an efference copy of the motor command are sufficient to explain the gradual loss of syntax in the absence of auditory feedback. The model also reproduces for the first time experimental findings on the influence of altered auditory feedback on the song syntax generation, and predicts song- and species-specific low frequency components in the LFP. This study illustrates how sequential compositionality following a defined syntax can be realized in networks of spiking neurons
Why Are Computational Neuroscience and Systems Biology So Separate?
Despite similar computational approaches, there is surprisingly little interaction between the computational neuroscience and the systems biology research communities. In this review I reconstruct the history of the two disciplines and show that this may explain why they grew up apart. The separation is a pity, as both fields can learn quite a bit from each other. Several examples are given, covering sociological, software technical, and methodological aspects. Systems biology is a better organized community which is very effective at sharing resources, while computational neuroscience has more experience in multiscale modeling and the analysis of information processing by biological systems. Finally, I speculate about how the relationship between the two fields may evolve in the near future
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