Marifi Guler
Department of Computer Engineering
Eastern Mediterranean University (Turkey)

"Towards a dissipative stochastic mechanics based theory of ion channel noise"

This talk addresses neuronal dynamics under the influence of ion channel noise, and argues that the problem is inherently more complicated than previously thought. The talk then concentrates on a new theoretical approach to the problem that was recently proposed by the author.  Led by the presence of multiple numbers of gates in an ion channel, the approach establishes a dual viewpoint of channel noise and adopts the reduced density operator techniques in the realm of Nelson's stochastic mechanics when open to dissipative environments. The formalism therein was scrutinized using a special membrane with some tailored properties giving the Rose-Hindmarsh dynamics in the deterministic limit. Renormalizations of the membrane capacitance and of a membrane voltage dependent potential function were foreseen to arise. The renormalization corrections were found to augment the behavioral transitions from quiescence to spiking and from tonic firing to bursting.