Chimera states for coupled oscillators.

Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Cornell University, 212 Kimball Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853-1503, USA. dma32@cornell.edu

Arrays of identical oscillators can display a remarkable spatiotemporal pattern in which phase-locked oscillators coexist with drifting ones. Discovered two years ago, such "chimera states" are believed to be impossible for locally or globally coupled systems; they are peculiar to the intermediate case of nonlocal coupling. Here we present an exact solution for this state, for a ring of phase oscillators coupled by a cosine kernel. We show that the stable chimera state bifurcates from a spatially modulated drift state, and dies in a saddle-node bifurcation with an unstable chimera state.

PMID: 15525081 [PubMed]