On a toy model of interacting neurons

Nicolas Fournier, Eva Löcherbach

Published 2014-10-13Version 1

We continue the study of a stochastic system of interacting neurons introduced in De Masi-Galves-L\"ocherbach-Presutti (2014). The system consists of N neurons, each spiking randomly with rate depending on its membrane potential. At its spiking time, the neuron potential is reset to 0 and all other neurons receive an additional amount 1/N of potential. Moreover, electrical synapses induce a deterministic drift of the system towards its center of mass. We prove propagation of chaos of the system, as N tends to infinity, to a limit nonlinear jumping stochastic differential equation. We consequently improve on the results of De Masi-Galves-L\"ocherbach-Presutti (2014), since (i) we remove the compact support condition on the initial datum, (ii) we get a rate of convergence in $1/\sqrt N$. Finally, we study the limit equation: we describe the shape of its time-marginals, we prove the existence of a unique non-trivial invariant distribution, we show that the trivial invariant distribution is not attractive, and in a special case, we establish the convergence to equilibrium.