Where does bursting collide?

In astrophysics a burst is a short, intense flare of radiation from a distant source, the paradigm case being the gamma-ray burst: a sudden flood of high-energy photons lasting from a fraction of a second to minutes that briefly outshines the rest of the gamma-ray sky. Klebesadel, Strong, and Olson's 1973 Observations of gamma-ray bursts of cosmic origin reported the first detections, made by satellites built to watch for nuclear tests. The referent is a transient astrophysical explosion characterised by its duration and energy, unrelated to a neuron's firing pattern or to network traffic beyond the shared image of a sudden eruption.[1]

Unit

The duration and energy of a transient radiation flare

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Characterised by burst duration, photon-energy spectrum, and fluence

In computer networking, burstiness describes traffic that arrives in dense clusters separated by quiet gaps rather than at a steady rate, so that demand clumps across many time scales at once. Leland, Taqqu, Willinger, and Wilson's 1994 On the self-similar nature of Ethernet traffic showed that real traffic stays bursty even when averaged over long windows (it is statistically self-similar), which overturned the smooth Poisson models engineers had assumed. The referent is the temporal clustering of packets or demand, measured by self-similarity and burst statistics, a different construct from a cosmic flare or a neuron's spike cluster.[2]

Unit

The degree to which demand clusters in time rather than spreading evenly

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Quantified by the Hurst exponent, the peak-to-mean ratio, and burst size and duration

In neuroscience, bursting is a firing mode in which a neuron produces a rapid cluster of action potentials (a burst) separated by quiet intervals, rather than firing isolated single spikes. Izhikevich's 2000 Neural excitability, spiking and bursting classified the dynamical mechanisms that switch a cell between spiking and bursting and traced them to the interplay of fast and slow membrane currents. The referent is a temporal pattern of a neuron's own electrical output, measured by spikes per burst and inter-burst interval, and it shares only the word with network traffic and cosmic bursts.[3]

Unit

The number and timing of spikes within a neuron's burst

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Characterised by spikes per burst, intra-burst frequency, and inter-burst interval