Spike Onset Dynamics and Response Speed in Neuronal Populations

Recent studies of cortical neurons driven by fluctuating currents revealed cutoff frequencies for action potential encoding of several hundred Hz. Theoretical studies of biophysical neuron models have predicted a much lower cutoff frequency of the order of average firing rate or the inverse membrane time constant. The biophysical origin of the observed high cutoff frequencies is thus not well understood. Here we introduce a neuron model with dynamical action potential generation, in which the linear response can be analytically calculated for uncorrelated synaptic noise. We find that the cutoff frequencies increase to very large values when the time scale of action potential initiation becomes short

Geometry and the anomalous Hall effet in ferromagnets

The geometric ideas underlying the Berry phase and the modern viewpoint of Karplus and Luttinger's theory of the anomalous Hall effect are discussed in an elementary way. We briefly review recent Hall and Nernst experiments which support the dominant role of the KL velocity term in ferromagnets.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, conference proceedings, tutorial revie

Solvable Lattice Gas Models with Three Phases

Phase boundaries in p-T and p-V diagrams are essential in material science researches. Exact analytic knowledge about such phase boundaries are known so far only in two-dimensional (2D) Ising-like models, and only for cases with two phases. In the present paper we present several lattice gas models, some with three phases. The phase boundaries are either analytically calculated or exactly evaluated.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure