BICTEL/e - ULg
Serveur institutionnel des thèses de doctorat

• Peskin model
• oscillators
• impulsive coupling
• synchronization
• nonlinear dynamical systems
• discrete-time systems
• networks
• partial differential equations

The study of populations of pulse-coupled firing oscillators is a general and simple paradigm to investigate a wealth of natural phenomena, including the collective behaviors of neurons, the

synchronization of cardiac pacemaker cells, or the dynamics of earthquakes. In this framework, the oscillators of the network interact through an instantaneous impulsive coupling: whenever an oscillator fires, it sends out a pulse which instantaneously increments the state of the other

oscillators by a constant value.

There is an extensive literature on the subject, which investigates various model extensions, but only in the case of leaky integrate-and-fire oscillators. In contrast, the present dissertation addresses the study of other integrate-and-fire dynamics: general monotone integrate-and-fire

dynamics and quadratic integrate-and-fire dynamics.

The main contribution of the thesis highlights that the populations of oscillators exhibit a dichotomic collective behavior: either the oscillators achieve perfect synchrony (slow firing frequency) or the oscillators converge toward a phase-locked clustering configuration (fast firing frequency). The dichotomic behavior is established both for finite and infinite populations of oscillators, drawing a strong parallel between discrete-time systems in finite-dimensional spaces and continuous-time systems in infinite-dimensional spaces.

The first part of the dissertation is dedicated to the study of monotone integrate-and-fire dynamics. We show that the dichotomic behavior of the oscillators results from the monotonicity property of the dynamics: the monotonicity property induces a global contraction property of the network, that forces the dichotomic behavior. Interestingly, the analysis

emphasizes that the contraction property is captured through a 1-norm, instead of a (more common) quadratic norm.

In the second part of the dissertation, we investigate the collective behavior of quadratic integrate-and-fire oscillators. Although the dynamics is not monotone, an “average” monotonicity

property ensures that the collective behavior is still dichotomic. However, a global analysis of the dichotomic behavior is elusive and leads to a standing conjecture. A local stability analysis circumvents this issue and proves the dichotomic behavior in particular situations (small networks, weak coupling, etc.). Surprisingly, the local stability analysis shows that specific integrate-and-fire oscillators exhibit a non-dichotomic behavior, thereby suggesting that the dichotomic behavior is not a general feature of every network of pulse-coupled oscillators.

The present thesis investigates the remarkable dichotomic behavior that emerges from networks of pulse-coupled integrate-and-fire oscillators, putting emphasis on the stability properties

of these particular networks and developing theoretical results for the analysis of the corresponding dynamical systems.

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