Resonant features in a forced population of excitatory neurons

In recent years, the study of coupled excitable oscillators has largely benefited from a new analytical technique developed by Ott and Antonsen. This technique allows to express the dynamics of certain macroscopic observable in the ensemble in terms of a reduced set of ordinary differential equations. This makes it possible to build low-dimensional models for the global activity of neural systems from first principles. We investigated the macroscopic response of a large set of excitatory neurons to different forcing strategies. We report resonant behavior, that depends on the heterogeneity between the units and their coupling strength. This contrasts with the type of response that an external forcing can elicit in simple and widely used phenomenological models.