Spatiotemporal dynamics of the Kuramoto-Sakaguchi model with time-dependent connectivity.

Abstract

We study the dynamics of the paradigmatic Kuramoto-Sakaguchi model of identical coupled phase oscillators with various kinds of time-dependent connectivity using Eulerian discretization. We explore the parameter spaces for various types of collective states using the phase plots of the two statistical quantities, namely, the strength of incoherence and the discontinuity measure. In the quasistatic limit of the changing of coupling range, we observe how the system relaxes from one state to another and identify a few interesting collective dynamical states along the way. Under a sinusoidal change of the coupling range, the global order parameter characterizing the degree of synchronization in the system is shown to undergo a hysteresis with the coupling range. We also study the low-dimensional spatiotemporal dynamics of the local order parameter in the continuum limit using the recently developed Ott-Antonsen ansatz and justify some of our numerical results. In particular, we identify an intrinsic time scale of the Kuramoto system and show that the simulations exhibit two distinct kinds of qualitative behavior in two cases when the time scale associated with the switching of the coupling radius is very large compared to the intrinsic time scale and when it is comparable to the intrinsic time scale.