Fluctuations for mean field limits of interacting systems of spiking neurons

Abstract: We consider a system of $N$ neurons, each spiking randomly with rate depending on its membrane potential. When a neuron spikes, its potential is reset to $0$ and all other neurons receive an additional amount $h/N$ of potential, where $ h > 0$ is some fixed parameter. In between successive spikes, each neuron's potential undergoes some leakage at constant rate $ \alpha. $ While the propagation of chaos of the system, as $N \to \infty$, to a limit nonlinear jumping stochastic differential equation has already been established in a series of papers, see De Masi et al. (2015) and Fournier and L\"ocherbach (2016), the present paper is devoted to the associated central limit theorem. More precisely we study the measure valued process of fluctuations at scale $ N^{-1/2}$ of the empirical measures of the membrane potentials, centered around the associated limit. We show that this fluctuation process, interpreted as c`adl`ag process taking values in a suitable weighted Sobolev space, converges in law to a limit process characterized by a system of stochastic differential equations driven by Gaussian white noise. We complete this picture by studying the fluctuations, at scale $ N^{-1/2}, $ of a fixed number of membrane potential processes around their associated limit quantities, giving rise to a mesoscopic approximation of the membrane potentials that take into account the correlations within the finite system.