Periodic orbits in the Ott–Antonsen manifold

Abstract

In their seminal paper (2008 Chaos 18 037113), Ott and Antonsen showed that large groups of phase oscillators driven by a certain type of common force display low dimensional long-term dynamics, which is described by a small number of ordinary differential equations. This fact was later used as a simplifying reduction technique in many studies of synchronisation phenomena occurring in networks of coupled oscillators and in neural networks. Most of these studies focused mainly on partially synchronised states corresponding to the equilibrium-type dynamics in the so called Ott–Antonsen manifold. Going beyond this paradigm, here we propose a universal approach for the efficient analysis of partially synchronised states with non-equilibrium periodic collective dynamics. Our method is based on the observation that the Poincaré map of the complex Riccati equation, which describes the dynamics in the Ott–Antonsen manifold, coincides with the well-known Möbius transformation. To illustrate the possibilities of our method, we use it to calculate a complete bifurcation diagram of travelling chimera states in a ring network of phase oscillators with asymmetric nonlocal coupling.