Analytic approximations of statistical quantities and response of noisy oscillators

Nonlinear oscillators have been utilized in many contexts because they encompass a large class of phenomena. For a reduced phase oscillator model with weak noise forcing that is necessarily multiplicative, we provide analytic formulas for the stationary statistical quantities of the random period. This is an important quantity which we term ‘response’ (i.e., the spike times, instantaneous frequency in neuroscience, the cycle time in chemical reactions, etc.) that is often analytically intractable in noisy oscillator systems. The analytic formulas are accurate in the weak noise limit so that one does not have to numerically solve a time-varying Fokker–Planck equation. The steady-state and dynamic responses are also analyzed with deterministic forcing. A second order analytic formula is derived for the steady-state response, whereas the dynamic response with time-varying forcing is more complicated. We focus on the specific case where the forcing is sinusoidal and accurately capture the frequency response with an analytic approximation that is obtained with a rescaling of the equation. By utilizing various techniques in the weak noise regime, this work leads to a better understanding of how the random period of nonlinear oscillators are affected by multiplicative noise and external forcing. Comparisons of the asymptotic formulas with a full oscillator system confirm the qualitative accurateness of the theory.