Filtering induced explosive death in coupled FitzHugh–Nagumo neurons: Theory and experiment

Explosive emergent behavior governed by discontinuous and irreversible phase transition is in the center of recent research. In this paper we show that explosive amplitude death (AD) can be induced in a system of coupled oscillators if diffusion is accompanied by low-pass filtering in the mutual coupling path. Here we consider a ring network of diffusively coupled FitzHugh–Nagumo oscillators, and through theoretical and experimental investigations explore how the low-pass filter induces and controls the transition to explosive AD state. We derive the conditions of getting AD in the network through linear stability analysis. Using one and two parameter bifurcation analysis we find the explicit parametric zone of explosive death in the limiting case of two neurons, which reveals that the explosive death arises through the saddle–node bifurcation of limit cycle. In the strong coupling limit, we observe an interesting semi-explosive death scenario, where both continuous and discontinuous transitions are present. Finally, using electronic hardware circuits, we demonstrate the first experimental observation of explosive amplitude death that establishes the robustness of the scenario in a practical setup.