The cross-frequency mediation mechanism of intracortical information transactions

In a seminal paper by von Stein and Sarnthein (2000), it was hypothesized that "bottom-up" information processing of "content" elicits local, high frequency (beta-gamma) oscillations, whereas "top-down" processing is "contextual", characterized by large scale integration spanning distant cortical regions, and implemented by slower frequency (theta-alpha) oscillations. This corresponds to a mechanism of cortical information transactions, where synchronization of beta-gamma oscillations between distant cortical regions is mediated by widespread theta-alpha oscillations. It is the aim of this paper to express this hypothesis quantitatively, in terms of a model that will allow testing this type of information transaction mechanism. The basic methodology used here corresponds to statistical mediation analysis, originally developed by (Baron and Kenny 1986). We generalize the classical mediator model to the case of multivariate complex-valued data, consisting of the discrete Fourier transform coefficients of signals of electric neuronal activity, at different frequencies, and at different cortical locations. The "mediation effect" is quantified here in a novel way, as the product of "dual frequency RV-coupling coefficients", that were introduced in (Pascual-Marqui et al 2016, http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05343). Relevant statistical procedures are presented for testing the cross-frequency mediation mechanism in general, and in particular for testing the von Stein & Sarnthein hypothesis.Comment: https://doi.org/10.1101/119362 licensed as CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Quantum System under Periodic Perturbation: Effect of Environment

In many physical situations the behavior of a quantum system is affected by interaction with a larger environment. We develop, using the method of influence functional, how to deduce the density matrix of the quantum system incorporating the effect of environment. After introducing characterization of the environment by spectral weight, we first devise schemes to approximate the spectral weight, and then a perturbation method in field theory models, in order to approximately describe the environment. All of these approximate models may be classified as extended Ohmic models of dissipation whose differences are in the high frequency part. The quantum system we deal with in the present work is a general class of harmonic oscillators with arbitrary time dependent frequency. The late time behavior of the system is well described by an approximation that employs a localized friction in the dissipative part of the correlation function appearing in the influence functional. The density matrix of the quantum system is then determined in terms of a single classical solution obtained with the time dependent frequency. With this one can compute the entropy, the energy distribution function, and other physical quantities of the system in a closed form. Specific application is made to the case of periodically varying frequency. This dynamical system has a remarkable property when the environmental interaction is switched off: Effect of the parametric resonance gives rise to an exponential growth of the populated number in higher excitation levels, or particle production in field theory models. The effect of the environment is investigated for this dynamical system and it is demonstrated that there existsComment: 55 pages, LATEX file plus 13 PS figures. A few calculational mistatkes and corresponding figure 1 in field theory model corrected and some changes made for publication in Phys. Rev.D (in press

Measurement of cosmic-ray low-energy antiproton spectrum with the first BESS-Polar Antarctic flight

The BESS-Polar spectrometer had its first successful balloon flight over Antarctica in December 2004. During the 8.5-day long-duration flight, almost 0.9 billion events were recorded and 1,520 antiprotons were detected in the energy range 0.1-4.2 GeV. In this paper, we report the antiproton spectrum obtained, discuss the origin of cosmic-ray antiprotons, and use antiprotons to probe the effect of charge sign dependent drift in the solar modulation.Comment: 18 pages, 1 table, 5 figures, submitted to Physics Letters

Multi-site breathers in Klein-Gordon lattices: stability, resonances, and bifurcations

We prove the most general theorem about spectral stability of multi-site breathers in the discrete Klein-Gordon equation with a small coupling constant. In the anti-continuum limit, multi-site breathers represent excited oscillations at different sites of the lattice separated by a number of "holes" (sites at rest). The theorem describes how the stability or instability of a multi-site breather depends on the phase difference and distance between the excited oscillators. Previously, only multi-site breathers with adjacent excited sites were considered within the first-order perturbation theory. We show that the stability of multi-site breathers with one-site holes change for large-amplitude oscillations in soft nonlinear potentials. We also discover and study a symmetry-breaking (pitchfork) bifurcation of one-site and multi-site breathers in soft quartic potentials near the points of 1:3 resonance.Comment: 34 pages, 12 figure