Collective behavior of cortico-thalamic circuits: Logic gates as the thalamus and a dynamical neuronal network as the cortex

This paper introduces a two-layer network to investigate the effects of cortico-thalamic circuits on the cortex's collective behavior. In the brain, different parts of the cortex collaborate to process information. One of the main parts, which is the path of different cortex contacts, is the thalamus whose circuit is referred to as the "vertical" cortico-thalamic connectivity. Thalamus subnuclei can participate in the processing of the information that passes through them. It has been shown that they play the functional role of logic gates (AND, OR and XOR). To study how these thalamus circuits affect the cortical neuron behavior, a two-layer network is proposed wherein the cortex layer is composed of Hindmarsh-Rose models and the thalamus layer is constructed with logic gates. Results show that considering these logic gates can lead the network towards different synchronization, asynchronization, chimera and solitary patterns. It is revealed that for AND-gate and OR-gate, increasing the number of gates or their outputs can increase and decrease the network's coherency in excitatory and inhibitory cases, respectively. However, considering XOR-gates always results in the chimera state.     

Structural and thermodynamic properties of the restricted primitive model electrolyte in a mixture with uncharged hard spheres: a grand canonical Monte Carlo simulation and integral equation study

A restricted primitive model electrolyte in a mixture with uncharged hard spheres was studied at room temperature using grand canonical Monte Carlo computer simulation and Ornstein–Zernike integral equation theory in the hypernetted chain approximation (HNC). The mean spherical approximation results are also presented for a few cases. We obtained the pair distribution functions of species of the system, the dependencies of the total fluid density and the ionic fraction on the chemical potentials, the excess internal energy and the heat capacity at constant volume for a wide range of chemical potentials of the species from the simulations and HNC theory. In the majority of cases, good agreement between the theoretical predictions and simulation data is obtained. The composition of the mixture is determined by the chemical potentials of both species. The pair distribution functions have a Debye-like shape at low densities for various values of the ion fraction. By increasing the chemical potential of the uncharged component, weak trends for structuring of the solution are observed with the formation of ion-hard sphere-ion complexes. At high densities, a tendency for in-phase oscillations of ion–ion functions is observed similar to the pure electrolyte in the restricted primitive model. We analysed the chemical potential–density and the chemical potential–ion fraction projections of the equation of state in detail. Also, the heat capacity at constant volume has been calculated for the first time. The model and the results are useful for the development of the theory of inhomogeneous fluid mixtures.