Symmetry breakings in two populations of oscillators coupled via diffusive environments: Chimera and heterosynchrony

Abstract

We consider two diffusively coupled populations of identical oscillators, where the oscillators in each population are coupled with a common dynamic environment. Existence and stability of a variety of stationary states are analyzed on the basis of the Ott-Antonsen reduction method, which reveals that the chimera state occurs under the diffusive coupling scheme. Furthermore, we find an exotic symmetry-breaking behavior, the so-called the heterosynchronous state, in which each population exhibits in-phase coherence, while the order parameters of two populations rotate at different phase velocities. The chimera and heterosynchronous states emerge from bistabilities of distinct states for decoupled population and occur as a unique continuation for weak diffusive couplings. The heterosynchronous state is caused by an indirect coupling scheme via dynamic environments and could occur for a finite-size system as well, even for the system that consists of one oscillator per population.