# Introduction

Plasticity processes are mediated by signalling ions, eg Ca++, which are generated by 
synapses upon reception of a spike. This adds a quantity `Xd` for any ion `X`
- initialised as `Xi`
- read from and written to by NMODL density and point mechanisms.
- propagates according to a diffusion law `∂_t Xd = ∂_z c X ∂_z Xd + iX/qi`.
- in contrast to `Xi` and `Xo` there's no buffering and the update in mechanisms
  occurs atomically (and at a different time)

More details can be found in the documentation.

For the future there are some low hanging optimisations
- per-ion conductivity for the matrix solver could be disabled if no diffusion is computed
- cable and diffusion solvers store duplicates of the solver state, could be merged

Closes #1651