Unusual phenomena on capacitively coupled stochastic spiking oscillators

We take advantage of the threshold resistive switching and self-oscillation of the Mott insulator VO₂, to implement stochastic spiking oscillators, which resemble jittering behavior of biological neurons. Interestingly, we observe that the intrinsic spiking stochasticity has a strong impact on capacitively coupled oscillators. A deterministic anti-phase synchronization can be achieved when two oscillators are coupled with a small capacitor. However, as the capacitive coupling strength increases, the deterministic alternating spiking gives way to stochastic spiking patterns in which an oscillator may have counterintuitive stochastic disruptive events. The stochastic disruptions of the alternating sequence of coupled spiking oscillators leads to a multimodal inter spike interval (ISI) distribution which resembles the multimodal spiking behavior in biological sensory neurons. This may have potential applications in Spiking Neural Networks and other computing related applications. Using the stochastic disruptive events of coupled spiking oscillators, we are able to demonstrate random number generation with potential for cryptographic applications.