Reduced dynamics and symmetric solutions for globally coupled weakly dissipative oscillators

Abstract

Systems of coupled oscillators may exhibit spontaneous dynamical formation of attracting synchronized clusters with broken symmetry; this can be helpful in modelling various physical processes. Analytical computation of the stability of synchronized cluster states is usually impossible for arbitrary nonlinear oscillators. In this paper we examine a particular class of strongly nonlinear oscillators that are analytically tractable. We examine the effect of isochronicity (a turning point in the dependence of period on energy) of periodic oscillators on clustered states of globally coupled oscillator networks. We extend previous work on networks of weakly dissipative globally coupled nonlinear Hamiltonian oscillators to give conditions for the existence and stability of certain clustered periodic states under the assumption that dissipation and coupling are small and of similar order. This is verified by numerical simulations on an example system of oscillators that are weakly dissipative perturbations of a planar Hamiltonian oscillator with a quartic potential. Finally we use the reduced phase-energy model derived from the weakly dissipative case to motivate a new class of phase-energy models that can be usefully employed for understanding effects such as clustering and torus breakup in more general coupled oscillator systems. We see that the property of isochronicity usefully generalizes to such systems, and we examine some examples of their attracting dynamics.