Stern-Brocot trees in cascades of mixed-mode oscillations and canards in the extended Bonhoeffer-van der Pol and the FitzHugh-Nagumo models of excitable systems

We report a systematic two-parameter study of the organization of mixed-mode oscillations and period-adding sequences observed in an extended Bonhoeffer-van der Pol and in a FitzHugh-Nagumo oscillator. For both systems, we construct isospike diagrams and show that the number of spikes of their periodic oscillations are organized in a remarkable hierarchical way, forming a Stern-Brocot tree. The Stern-Brocot tree is more general than the Farey tree. We conjecture the Stern-Brocot tree to also underlie the hierarchical structure of periodic oscillations of other systems supporting mixed-mode oscillations. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.