Responses of a Noisy Excitable System to External Signals with Different Periods

The behaviour of an excitable system under Gaussian white noise and external periodic forcing is systematically studied. In a large range of noise intensity, the n:1 phase locking patterns are obtained for certain ranges of the input periods, where n input periods give one spike. In the phase locking regimes, the system presents low noise-to-signal ratios and shows better regularities. Out of the regimes the system behaves less regularly and the relations between the noise-to-signal ratio and the noise intensity exhibit typical stochastic resonance phenomena. At a higher noise level, the system shows the characteristic behaviour of the noise.