Chimera States mediated by nonlocally attractive-repulsive coupling in FitzHugh–Nagumo neural networks

Abstract

The spontaneous occurrence of heterogeneous behaviors in homogeneous systems is an intriguing phenomenon. Recently, a remarkable heterogeneous behavior, called “chimera states”, which consists of spatially coherent and incoherent domains, has been studied in a great variety of systems including physical, chemical, biological, or optical. In this paper, chimera states in FitzHugh–Nagumo (FHN) neural networks are investigated. The identical FHN neurons are assigned in a ring and nonlocally coupled by attractive and repulsive couplings. We show that, the chimera states can be induced by the cooperation of nonlocally attractive and repulsive interactions between these neurons. Moreover, depending on the strength and range of attractive or repulsive couplings, the neural networks display different spatiotemporal behaviors, including chimera states, multi-cluster (MC) chimera states, traveling waves, traveling coherent states, solitary states, bursting synchronizations, and synchronizations. These results suggest that attractive and repulsive couplings may play a crucial role in mediating dynamic behavior of neural networks, and these results could be useful in understanding and predicting the rich dynamics of neural networks.