Enhancement of stability in systems with metastable states

The investigation of noise‐induced phenomena in far from equilibrium systems is one of the approach used to understand the behaviour of physical and biological complex systems. Metastability is a generic feature of many nonlinear systems, and the problem of the lifetime of metastable states involves fundamental aspects of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. The enhancement of the life‐time of metastable states through the noise enhanced stability effect and the role played by the resonant activation phenomenon will be discussed in models of interdisciplinary physics: (i) Ising model (ii) Josephson junction; (iii) stochastic FitzHugh‐Nagumo model; (iv) a population dynamics model, and (v) …

Role of the colored noise in a FitzHugh-Nagumo system driven by a periodic signal

During these last years the interest in neuronal dynamics increased. The study of this kind of system has been carried out by using the FitzHugh-Nagumo (FHN) model that is a simplified modification of the Hodgkin-Huxley model. Many interesting phenomena can be observed in the presence of fluctuations: modification of detection threshold by manipulation of noisy parameters (FHN model), noise-induced activation and coeherence resonance for suitable noise amplitude (absence of periodic signal), resonant activation for high periodic signals and noise reduction, intrinsic stochastic resonance (ISR) in Hodgkin-Huxley neuron and the enhancement of a weak signal by tuning the subthreshold intrinsic…

Spectral properties of correlation matrices for some hierarchically nested factor models

We show that spectral methods, such as Principal Component Analysis and Random Matrix Theory, are unable to reveal the hierarchical (or nested) structure of a set of mutivariate data. We consider the method introduced in M. Tumminello et al., EPL 78, 30006 (2007) to associate a hierarchical factor model with a set of data by making use of clustering algorithms. This is done by proving the existence of a bijective correspondence between a hierarchical tree and a factor model.

Noise induced effects in overdamped Josephson junction in the presence of colored noise

We analyze the role of the correlated fluctuations, with a correlation time τc, in the dynamics of an overdamped Josephson junction in the presence of a periodic driving signal.

Abstracts from the CECAM workshop on computer simulations of cellular automata