Stability of wandering bumps for Hawkes processes interacting on the circle

Abstract: We consider a population of Hawkes processes modeling the activity of $N$ interacting neurons. The neurons are regularly positioned on the circle $[-\pi, \pi]$, and the connectivity between neurons is given by a cosine kernel. The firing rate function is a sigmoid. The large population limit admits a locally stable manifold of stationary solutions. The main result of the paper concerns the long-time proximity of the synaptic voltage of the population to this manifold in polynomial times in $N$. We show in particular that the phase of the voltage along this manifold converges towards a Brownian motion on a time scale of order $N$.