Stability of a family of travelling wave solutions in a feedforward chain of phase oscillators

Abstract

Travelling waves are an important class of signal propagation phenomena in extended systems with a preferred direction of information flow. We study the generation of travelling waves in unidirectional chains of coupled oscillators communicating via a phase-dependent pulse-response interaction borrowed from mathematical neuroscience. Within the context of such systems, we develop a widely applicable, jointly numerical and analytical methodology for deducing existence and stability of periodic travelling waves. We provide careful numerical studies that support the existence of a periodic travelling wave solution as well as the asymptotic relaxation of a single oscillator to the wave when it is forced with the wave profile. Using this evidence as an assumption, we analytically prove global stability of waves in the infinite chain, with respect to initial perturbations of downstream sites. This rigorous stability result suggests that asymptotic relaxation to the travelling wave occurs even when the forcing is perturbed from the wave profile, a property of the motivating system that is supported by previous work as well as the convergence of the more sophisticated numerical algorithm that we propose in order to compute a high-precision approximation to the solution. We provide additional numerical studies that show that the wave is part of a one-parameter family, and we illustrate the structural robustness of this family with respect to changes in the coupling strength.