Observable for a Large System of Globally Coupled Excitable Units

The study of large arrays of coupled excitable systems has largely benefited from a technique proposed by Ott and Antonsen, which results in a low dimensional system of equations for the system’s order parameter. In this work, we show how to explicitly introduce a variable describing the global synaptic activation of the network into these family of models. This global variable is built by adding realistic synaptic time traces. We propose that this variable can, under certain conditions, be a good proxy for the local field potential of the network. We report experimental, in vivo, electrophysiology data supporting this claim.