SYNCHRONIZATION PHENOMENA IN NETWORKS OF COUPLED RELAXATION ELECTROCHEMICAL OSCILLATIONS

Abstract

Networks of weakly coupled discrete electrochemical oscillators have the ability of synchronizing rapidly in-phase or out-of-phase, depending on the network geometry. It is shown that a network consisting of N relaxation electrochemical oscillators, coupled through inhibitory connections, can have (N - 1)! coexisting out-of-phase states, each state being a permutation of a periodic spiking sequence. The out-of-phase states can be modified by shots of laser pulse perturbations and the phase relation is stored as a coded spatiotemporal pattern. The ability of the network to function as a re-writable memory of (N - 1)! different spatiotemporal patterns is demonstrated experimentally for N = 4.