CHIMERA-LIKE STATES IN BALANCED NEURAL CIRCUITS

For a long time network scientists have been delving into the dynamics of sparsely connected networks with the aim to understand the nature of temporal irregularity of cortical neurons. This temporal variability in firing has been corresponded to the emergence of a balanced state in large cortical networks - a state where the excitatory and inhibitory connections cancel each other leaving only the fluctuations that amount to the irregular spiking activity. We investigate this behaviour for different network settings. Another phenomenon that we investigate is the breakage of symmetry of the oscillator population where one part synchronizes and the other part oscillates incoherently. Such behavior has been called 'Chimera state' and has been observed a decade ago for the first time. In this project, we explored the balanced state in populations of spiking neurons. We investigated how the populations reach the asynchronous irregular and synchronous regular state. We then simulated networks of connected populations and investigated how to induce chimera like properties.''