Chaos and correlated avalanches in excitatory neural networks with   synaptic plasticity
  A collective chaotic phase with power law scaling of activity events is observed in a disordered mean field network of purely excitatory leaky integrate-and-fire neurons with short-term synaptic plasticity. The dynamical phase diagram exhibits two transitions from quasi-synchronous and asynchronous regimes to the nontrivial, collective, bursty regime with avalanches. In the homogeneous case without disorder, the system synchronizes and the bursty behavior is reflected into a doubling-period transition to chaos for a two dimensional discrete map. Numerical simulations show that the bursty chaotic phase with avalanches exhibits a spontaneous emergence of time correlations and enhanced Kolmogorov complexity. Our analysis reveals a mechanism for the generation of irregular avalanches that emerges from the combination of disorder and deterministic underlying chaotic dynamics. 
Fabrizio Pittorino, Miguel Ib\'a\~nez-Berganza, Matteo di Volo,   Alessandro Vezzani, Raffaella Burioni
cond-mat.dis-nn cond-mat.stat-mech nlin.AO q-bio.NC