Bifurcations in the Hodgkin-Huxley model exposed to DC electric fields

Diverse behaviors of the original Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) model, depending on the parameter values, have been studied extensively. This paper proposes modified HH equations exposed to externally applied extremely low frequency (ELF) electric fields. We investigate the effect of the DC electric fields on the dynamics of the modified HH model using bifurcation analysis. The obtained bifurcation sets partition the two dimensional parameter space, representing intensity of externally applied DC current and trans-membrane voltage induced by external DC electric fields, in terms of the qualitatively different behaviors of the HH model. Thus the neuronal information encodes the stimulus information, and vice versa. We also illustrate that the multi-stability phenomena in the HH model are associated with Hopf and double cycle bifurcations. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.