Phase switching in a system of two noisy Hodgkin-Huxley neurons coupled by a diffusive interaction.

The focus of this paper is on the synchronous activity of a system of two intrinsically noisy Hodgkin-Huxley neurons coupled by a diffusive interaction. It is shown that conductance noise allows the relative phase of the neurons to display several different dynamical regimes ranging from phase and antiphase locking to random switching between two or more states. A synchronization diagram displaying the structure of the distribution function of the cyclic relative phase of the two neurons is presented. The addition of sinusoidal forcing terms to the equations governing the membrane voltage of both neurons gives rise to the statistical locking of those random switchings to the phase of the external signal.