Videos

Emergent Metastability for Networks of Biological Oscillators

Presenter
May 15, 2013
Keywords:
  • Dynamical systems
MSC:
  • 70G60
Abstract
We will consider stochastic dynamical systems defined on networks that exhibit the phenomenon of collective metastability---by this we mean network dynamics where none of the individual nodes' dynamics are metastable, but the configuration is metastable in its collective behavior. In particular, we show how many biological oscillators --- both "pulse-coupled" and "phase-coupled" --- fall into this framework. We also examine a non-standard spectral problem that generically appears in these problems.