Chimera states in Leaky Integrate-and-Fire dynamics with power law coupling

Abstract

We investigate the robustness of chimera states under the influence of a nonlinear coupling in the form of a power law with exponent α. Taking as working example the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire model coupled in a 1D ring geometry, we show that the chimera states prevail for large values of the exponent α and small values of the coupling strength, while full synchronization is observed in the opposite ends. Our numerical results indicate that the coupling range R does not influence the frequency of oscillations in the coherent or in the incoherent domains. To the contrary, the R value affects the form of the chimera state: the size of the incoherent domains increase monotonically with R in expense of the size of the coherent ones. As an added value, our numerical results demonstrate that the frequency of oscillations decreases monotonically with the power exponent α. This feature can be useful in controlling the frequency of a network of oscillators by simply varying the nonlinearity exponent in the coupling, without modifying any of the other network attributes or parameters.