Network dynamics with higher-order interactions: coupled cell hypernetworks for identical cells and synchrony

Abstract

Network interactions that are nonlinear in the state of more than two nodes—also known as higher-order interactions—can have a profound impact on the collective network dynamics. Here we develop a coupled cell hypernetwork formalism to elucidate the existence and stability of (cluster) synchronization patterns in network dynamical systems with higher-order interactions. More specifically, we define robust synchrony subspace for coupled cell hypernetworks whose coupling structure is determined by an underlying hypergraph and describe those spaces for general such hypernetworks. Since a hypergraph can be equivalently represented as a bipartite graph between its nodes and hyperedges, we relate the synchrony subspaces of a hypernetwork to balanced colourings of the corresponding incidence digraph.