The interplay between excitatory and inhibitory neurons imparts rich functions of the brain. To understand the synaptic mechanisms underlying neuronal computations, a fundamental approach is to study the dynamics of excitatory and inhibitory synaptic inputs of each neuron. The traditional method of determining input conductance, which has been applied for decades, employs the synaptic current-voltage (I-V) relation obtained via voltage clamp. Due to the space clamp effect, the measured conductance is different from the local conductance on the dendrites. Therefore, the interpretation of the measured conductance remains to be clarified. Using theoretical analysis, electrophysiological experiments, and realistic neuron simulations, here we demonstrate that there does not exist a transform between the local conductance and the conductance measured by the traditional method, due to the neglect of a nonlinear interaction between the clamp current and the synaptic current in the traditional method. Consequently, the conductance determined by the traditional method may not correlate with the local conductance on the dendrites, and its value could be unphysically negative as observed in experiment. To circumvent the challenge of the space clamp effect and elucidate synaptic impact on neuronal information processing, we propose the concept of effective conductance which is proportional to the local conductance on the dendrite and reflects directly the functional influence of synaptic inputs on somatic membrane potential dynamics, and we further develop a framework to determine the effective conductance accurately. Our work suggests re-examination of previous studies involving conductance measurement and provides a reliable approach to assess synaptic influence on neuronal computation.

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The purpose of this research monograph is to survey some recent developments in the analysis of shock reflection-diffraction, to present our original mathematical proofs of von Neumann’s conjectures for potential flow, to collect most of the related results and new techniques in the analysis of partial differential equations achieved in the last decades, and to discuss a set of fundamental open problems relevant to the directions of future research in this and related areas.

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This paper presents entropy symmetrization and high-order accurate entropy stable schemes for the relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (RMHD) equations. It is shown that the conservative RMHD equations are not symmetrizable and do not admit a thermodynamic entropy pair. To address this issue, a symmetrizable RMHD system, equipped with a convex thermodynamic entropy pair, is first proposed by adding a source term into the equations, providing an analogue to the nonrelativistic Godunov--Powell system. Arbitrarily high-order accurate entropy stable finite difference schemes are developed on Cartesian meshes based on the symmetrizable RMHD system. The crucial ingredients of these schemes include (i) affordable explicit entropy conservative fluxes which are technically derived through carefully selected parameter variables, (ii) a special high-order discretization of the source term in the symmetrizable RMHD system, and (iii) suitable high-order dissipative operators based on essentially nonoscillatory reconstruction to ensure the entropy stability. Several numerical tests demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed entropy stable schemes.