Synchronization Transition of the Second-Order Kuramoto Model on Lattices

Abstract

The second-order Kuramoto equation describes the synchronization of coupled oscillators with inertia, which occur, for example, in power grids. On the contrary to the first-order Kuramoto equation, its synchronization transition behavior is significantly less known. In the case of Gaussian self-frequencies, it is discontinuous, in contrast to the continuous transition for the first-order Kuramoto equation. Herein, we investigate this transition on large 2D and 3D lattices and provide numerical evidence of hybrid phase transitions, whereby the oscillator phases θi exhibit a crossover, while the frequency is spread over a real phase transition in 3D. Thus, a lower critical dimension dlO=2 is expected for the frequencies and dlR=4 for phases such as that in the massless case. We provide numerical estimates for the critical exponents, finding that the frequency spread decays as ∼t-d/2 in the case of an aligned initial state of the phases in agreement with the linear approximation. In 3D, however, in the case of the initially random distribution of θi, we find a faster decay, characterized by ∼t-1.8(1) as the consequence of enhanced nonlinearities which appear by the random phase fluctuations.