Phase diagram of noisy systems of coupled oscillators with a bimodal frequency distribution

Abstract

We study the properties of large systems of globally coupled oscillators in the presence of noise. When the distribution of the natural frequencies of the oscillators is bimodal and its analytical continuation in the complex plane has only a few poles in the lower half plane, the dynamics of the system, governed by a Fokker–Planck equation for the single particle distribution function, can be reduced to a system of ordinary differential equations describing the dynamics of suitably defined order parameters, the first ones of which are related to the usual synchronization order parameter. We obtain the full phase diagram of the oscillator system, that shows a very rich behaviour, with regions characterized by synchronized states, regions with periodic states, and others with bi-stability, associated to the presence of hysteresis. The latter phenomenon is confirmed by numerical simulations ot the full system of coupled oscillators. We compare our results with those previously obtained for noiseless systems, and we show that for increasing noise the phase diagram changes qualitatively, tending to the simple diagram that is found for systems with unimodal frequency distributions.