Traveling waves and breathers in an excitatory-inhibitory neural field.

We study existence and stability of traveling activity bump solutions in an excitatory-inhibitory (E-I) neural field with Heaviside firing rate functions by deriving existence conditions for traveling bumps and an Evans function to analyze their spectral stability. Subsequently, we show that these existence and stability results reduce, in the limit of wave speed c→0, to the equivalent conditions developed for the stationary bump case. Using the results for the stationary bump case, we show that drift bifurcations of stationary bumps serve as a mechanism for generating traveling bump solutions in the E-I neural field as parameters are varied. Furthermore, we explore the interrelations between stationary and traveling types of bumps and breathers (time-periodic oscillatory bumps) by bridging together analytical and simulation results for stationary and traveling bumps and their bifurcations in a region of parameter space. Interestingly, we find evidence for a codimension-2 drift-Hopf bifurcation occurring as two parameters, inhibitory time constant τ and I-to-I synaptic connection strength w[over ¯]_{ii}, are varied and show that the codimension-2 point serves as an organizing center for the dynamics of these four types of spatially localized solutions. Additionally, we describe a case involving subcritical bifurcations that lead to traveling waves and breathers as τ is varied.