Multistable jittering in oscillators with pulsatile delayed feedback

Oscillatory systems with time-delayed pulsatile feedback appear in various applied and theoretical research areas, and received a growing interest in recent years. For such systems, we report a remarkable scenario of destabilization of a periodic regular spiking regime. At the bifurcation point numerous regimes with nonequal interspike intervals emerge. We show that the number of the emerging, so-called "jittering" regimes grows exponentially with the delay value. Although this appears as highly degenerate from a dynamical systems viewpoint, the "multijitter" bifurcation occurs robustly in a large class of systems. We observe it not only in a paradigmatic phase-reduced model, but also in a simulated Hodgkin-Huxley neuron model and in an experiment with an electronic circuit.