Chimera states as chaotic spatiotemporal patterns

Abstract

Chimera states are a recently new discovered dynamical phenomenon that appears in arrays of nonlocally coupled oscillators and displays a spatial pattern of coherent and incoherent regions. We report here an additional feature of this dynamical regime: an irregular motion of the position of the coherent and incoherent regions, i.e., we reveal the nature of the chimera as a spatiotemporal pattern with a regular macroscopic pattern in space, and an irregular motion in time. This motion is a finite-size effect that is not observed in the thermodynamic limit. We show that on a large time scale, it can be described as a Brownian motion. We provide a detailed study of its dependence on the number of oscillators N and the parameters of the system.