Equivariant bifurcation in a coupled complex-valued neural network rings

Network with interacting loops and time delays are common in physiological systems. In the past few years, the dynamic behaviors of coupled interacting loops neural networks have been widely studied due to their extensive applications in classification of pattern recognition, signal processing, image processing, engineering optimization and animal locomotion, and other areas, see the references therein. In a large amount of applications, complex signals often occur and the complex-valued recurrent neural networks are preferable. In this paper, we study a complex value Hopfield-type network that consists of a pair of one-way rings each with four neurons and two-way coupling between each ring. We discuss the spatio-temporal patterns of bifurcating periodic oscillations by using the symmetric bifurcation theory of delay differential equations combined with representation theory of Lie groups. The existence of multiple branches of bifurcating periodic solution is obtained. We also found that the spatio-temporal patterns of bifurcating periodic oscillations alternate according to the change of the propagation time delay in the coupling, i.e., different ranges of delays correspond to different patterns of neural network oscillators. The oscillations of corresponding neurons in the two loops can be in phase or anti-phase depending on the parameters and delay. Some numerical simulations support our analysis results.