Crisis transitions in excitable cell models

Abstract

It is believed that sudden changes both in the size of chaotic attractor and in the number of unstable periodic orbits on chaotic attractor are sufficient for interior crisis. In this paper, some interior crisis phenomena were discovered in a class of physically realizable dissipative dynamical systems. These systems represent the oscillatory activity of membrane potentials observed in excitable cells such as neuronal cells, pancreatic β-cells, and cardiac cells. We examined the occurrence of interior crises in these systems by two means: (i) constructing bifurcation diagrams and (ii) calculating the number of unstable periodic orbits on chaotic attractor. Bifurcation diagrams were obtained by numerically integrating the simultaneous differential equations which simulate the activity of excitable membranes. These bifurcation diagrams have shown an apparent crisis activity. We also demonstrate in terms of the associated Poincaré maps that the number of unstable periodic orbits embedded in a chaotic attractor suddenly increases or decreases at the crisis.