Spatio-temporal patterns of Hopf bifurcating periodic oscillations in a pair of identical tri-neuron network loops

Recently, the coupling time delay has been considered as the source of the occurrence of the phase-flip bifurcation in time-delay coupled system. But the analytical results of how the coupling time delay affects this phenomenon is still lacking. In this paper, we consider a pair of identical tri-neuron network coupled with time delay. By using the symmetric bifurcation theory of delay differential equations combined with representation theory of Lie groups, we investigate the spatio-temporal patterns of Hopf bifurcating periodic oscillations induced by the coupling time delay. The explicit intervals of delay and the regions in the plane of the coupling strength and the gain of the inherent response function for the existence of synchronized in-phase or anti-phase oscillation are obtained. Our study show that the coupling time delay does not affect the spatio-temporal patterns of the individual neural loop but it has the significant impact on the spatio-temporal patterns between the two loops. These analytic results are then verified by numerical simulations.