Spiral Wave Chimera Research Articles

Spatiotemporal patterns in a 2D lattice of Hindmarsh–Rose neurons induced by high-amplitude pulses

We present numerical results for the effects of influence by high-amplitude periodic pulse series on a network of nonlocally coupled Hindmarsh–Rose neurons with 2D geometry of the topology. We consider the case when the pulse amplitude is larger than the amplitude of oscillations in the autonomous network for a wide range of pulse frequencies. An initial regime in the network is a spiral wave chimera. We show that the effects of external influence strongly depend on a balance between the pulse frequency and frequencies of the spectral peaks of the autonomous network. Except for the destructive role of the pulses, when they lead to loss of stability of the initial regime, we have also revealed a constructive role. We have found for the first time the emergence of a new type of multi-front spiral waves, when the wavefront represents a set of several close fronts, and the wave dynamics are significantly different from common spiral waves: neurons oscillate independently to the wave rotation, the rotation velocity is in many times less than for the common spiral wave, etc. We have also discovered several types of cluster spatiotemporal structures induced by the pulses.

Spiral wave chimeras in nonlocally coupled bicomponent oscillators.

Chimera states in nonidentical oscillators have received extensive attention in recent years. Previous studies have demonstrated that chimera states can exist in a ring of nonlocally coupled bicomponent oscillators even in the presence of strong parameter heterogeneity. In this study, we investigate spiral wave chimeras in two-dimensional nonlocally coupled bicomponent oscillators where oscillators are randomly divided into two groups, with identical oscillators in the same group. Using phase oscillators and FitzHugh-Nagumo oscillators as examples, we numerically demonstrate that each group of oscillators supports its own spiral wave chimera and two spiral wave chimeras coexist with each other. We find that there exist three heterogeneity regimes: the synchronous regime at weak heterogeneity, the asynchronous regime at strong heterogeneity, and the transition regime in between. In the synchronous regime, spiral wave chimeras supported by different groups are synchronized with each other by sharing a same rotating frequency and a same incoherent core. In the asynchronous regime, the two spiral wave chimeras rotate at different frequencies and their incoherent cores are far away from each other. These phenomena are also observed in a nonrandom distribution of the two group oscillators and the continuum limit of infinitely many phase oscillators. The transition from synchronous to asynchronous spiral wave chimeras depends on the component oscillators. Specifically, it is a discontinuous transition for phase oscillators but a continuous one for FitzHugh-Nagumo oscillators. We also find that, in the asynchronous regime, increasing heterogeneity leads irregularly meandering spiral wave chimeras to rigidly rotating ones.

Traveling spiral wave chimeras in coupled oscillator systems: emergence, dynamics, and transitions

Systems of coupled nonlinear oscillators often exhibit states of partial synchrony in which some of the oscillators oscillate coherently while the rest remain incoherent. If such a state emerges spontaneously, in other words, if it cannot be associated with any heterogeneity in the system, it is generally referred to as a chimera state. In planar oscillator arrays, these chimera states can take the form of rotating spiral waves surrounding an incoherent core, resembling those observed in oscillatory or excitable media, and may display complex dynamical behavior. To understand this behavior we study stationary and moving chimera states in planar phase oscillator arrays using a combination of direct numerical simulations and numerical continuation of solutions of the corresponding continuum limit, focusing on the existence and properties of traveling spiral wave chimeras as a function of the system parameters. The oscillators are coupled nonlocally and their frequencies are drawn from a Lorentzian distribution. Two cases are discussed in detail, that of a top-hat coupling function and a two-parameter truncated Fourier approximation to this function in Cartesian coordinates. The latter allows semi-analytical progress, including determination of stability properties, leading to a classification of possible behaviors of both static and moving chimera states. The transition from stationary to moving chimeras is shown to be accompanied by the appearance of complex filamentary structures within the incoherent spiral wave core representing secondary coherence regions associated with temporal resonances. As the parameters are varied the number of such filaments may grow, a process reflected in a series of folds in the corresponding bifurcation diagram showing the drift speed s as a function of the phase-lag parameter α.

Chimeras in phase oscillator networks locally coupled through an auxiliary field: Stability and bifurcations

We study networks in the form of a lattice of nodes with a large number of phase oscillators and an auxiliary variable at each node. The only interactions between nodes are nearest-neighbor. The Ott/Antonsen ansatz is used to derive equations for the order parameters of the phase oscillators at each node, resulting in a set of coupled ordinary differential equations. Chimeras are steady states of these equations, and we follow them as parameters are varied, determining their stability and bifurcations. In two-dimensional domains, we find that spiral wave chimeras and rotating waves have significantly different properties than those in networks with nonlocal coupling.

Spiral wave chimeras in populations of oscillators coupled to a slowly varying diffusive environment

Chimera states are firstly discovered in nonlocally coupled oscillator systems. Such a nonlocal coupling arises typically as oscillators are coupled via an external environment whose characteristic time scale τ is so small (i.e., τ → o) that it could be eliminated adiabatically. Nevertheless, whether the chimera states still exist in the opposite situation (i.e., τ ≫ 1) is unknown. Here, by coupling large populations of Stuart—Landau oscillators to a diffusive environment, we demonstrate that spiral wave chimeras do exist in this oscillator-environment coupling system even when τ is very large. Various transitions such as from spiral wave chimeras to spiral waves or unstable spiral wave chimeras as functions of the system parameters are explored. A physical picture for explaining the formation of spiral wave chimeras is also provided. The existence of spiral wave chimeras is further confirmed in ensembles of FitzHugh—Nagumo oscillators with the similar oscillator-environment coupling mechanism. Our results provide an affirmative answer to the observation of spiral wave chimeras in populations of oscillators mediated via a slowly changing environment and give important hints to generate chimera patterns in both laboratory and realistic chemical or biological systems.

Chimeras on annuli.

Chimeras occur in networks of coupled oscillators and are characterized by the coexistence of synchronous and asynchronous groups of oscillators in different parts of the network. We consider a network of nonlocally coupled phase oscillators on an annular domain. The Ott/Antonsen ansatz is used to derive a continuum level description of the oscillators' expected dynamics in terms of a complex-valued order parameter. The equations for this order parameter are numerically analyzed in order to investigate solutions with the same symmetry as the domain and chimeras which are analogous to the "multi-headed" chimeras observed on one-dimensional domains. Such solutions are stable only for domains with widths that are neither too large nor too small. We also study rotating waves with different winding numbers, which are similar to spiral wave chimeras seen in two-dimensional domains. We determine ranges of parameters, such as the size of the domain for which such solutions exist and are stable, and the bifurcations by which they lose stability. All of these bifurcations appear subcritical.

Spiral wave chimeras in reaction-diffusion systems: Phenomenon, mechanism and transitions

Spiral wave chimeras (SWCs), which combine the features of spiral waves and chimera states, are a new type of dynamical patterns emerged in spatiotemporal systems due to the spontaneous symmetry breaking of the system dynamics. In generating SWC, the conventional wisdom is that the dynamical elements should be coupled in a nonlocal fashion. For this reason, it is commonly believed that SWC is excluded from the general reaction-diffusion (RD) systems possessing only local couplings. Here, by an experimentally feasible model of a three-component FitzHugh–Nagumo-type RD system, we demonstrate that, even though the system elements are locally coupled, stable SWCs can still be observed in a wide region in the parameter space. The properties of SWCs are explored, and the underlying mechanisms are analyzed from the point view of coupled oscillators. Transitions from SWC to incoherent states are also investigated, and it is found that SWCs are typically destabilized in two scenarios, namely core breakup and core expansion. The former is characterized by a continuous breakup of the single asynchronous core into a number of small asynchronous cores, whereas the latter is featured by the continuous expansion of the single asynchronous core to the whole space. Remarkably, in the scenario of core expansion, the system may develop into an intriguing state in which regular spiral waves are embedded in a completely disordered background. This state, which is named shadowed spirals, manifests from a new perspective the coexistence of incoherent and coherent states in spatiotemporal systems, generalizing therefore the traditional concept of chimera states. Our studies provide an affirmative answer to the observation of SWCs in typical RD systems, and pave a way to the realization of SWCs in experiments.

Spiral wave chimeras induced by heterogeneity in phase lags and time delays

A spiral wave chimera is a remarkable spatiotemporal pattern in a two-dimensional array of oscillators, for which the coherent spiral arms coexist with incoherent cores. So far the spiral wave chimeras have been known to occur in nonlocally coupled oscillators where the coupling strength between oscillators varies with the distance between them. Here we report on spiral wave chimeras for globally coupled phase oscillators with heterogeneous phase lags on the sphere. On the basis of Ott–Antonsen theory, we reduce our model to a low-dimensional system and present stability diagrams for different stationary states of the reduced system. We demonstrate the existence of spiral wave chimeras for the globally coupled phase oscillators with space-dependent interaction delays on the sphere, which are extended to appear also in the Stuart–Landau system of amplitude–phase oscillators. Chimeric behavior due to the heterogeneity in phase lags or time delays is peculiar to two-dimensional arrays of oscillators, which exhibits a self-emerging state in a wide parameter region. As an essential driving mechanism for the emergence of spiral chimeras, the space-dependent feature of interaction delays is omnipresent in nature and engineering systems, and we anticipate that our model and the related spiral chimera patterns will have widespread practical applications in the biological oscillatory networks.

Spiral wave chimera states in regular and fractal neuronal networks

Chimera states are spatial patterns in which coherent and incoherent patterns coexist. It was reported that small populations of coupled oscillators can exhibit chimera with transient nature. This spatial coexistence has been observed in various network topologies of coupled systems, such as coupled pendula, coupled chemical oscillators, and neuronal networks. In this work, we build two-dimensional neuronal networks with regular and fractal topologies to study chimera states. In the regular network, we consider a coupling between the nearest neighbours neurons, while the fractal network is constructed according to the square Cantor set. Our networks are composed of coupled adaptive exponential integrate-and-fire neurons, that can exhibit spike or burst activities. Depending on the parameters, we find spiral wave chimeras in both regular and fractal networks. The spiral wave chimeras arise for different values of the intensity of the excitatory synaptic conductance. In our simulations, we verify the existence of multicore chimera states. The cores are made up of neurons with desynchronous behaviour and the spiral waves rotates around them. The cores can be related to bumps or spatially localised pulses of neuronal activities. We also show that the initial value of the adaptation current plays an important role in the existence of spiral wave chimera states.

Quantifying the Transition from Spiral Waves to Spiral Wave Chimeras in a Lattice of Self-sustained Oscillators

The present work is devoted to the detailed quantification of the transition from spiral waves to spiral wave chimeras in a network of self-sustained oscillators with two-dimensional geometry. The basic elements of the networks are the van der Pol oscillator and the FitzHugh-Nagumo neuron. Both models are in the regime of relaxation oscillations. We analyze the regime by using the indices of local sensitivity which enables us to evaluate the sensitivity of each individual oscillator at finite time. Spi-ral waves are observed in both lattices when the interaction between elements have the local character. The dynamics of all the elements is regular. There are no high-sensitive regions. We have discovered that when the coupling becomes nonlocal, the features of the systems significantly changes. The oscillation regime of the spiral wave center element switches to chaotic one. Besides this, a region with high sensitivity occurs around this oscillator. Moreover, we show that the latter expands in space with elongation of the coupling range. As a result, an incoherence cluster of the spiral wave chimera is formed exactly within this high-sensitive area. Formation of this cluster is accompanied by the sharp increase in values of the maximal Lyapunov exponent to the positive region. Furthermore, we explore that the system can even switch to hyperchaotic regime, when several Lyapunov exponents becomes positive.

Bistable labyrinth-like structures and chimera states in a 2D lattice of van der Pol oscillators

The present work is devoted to the numerical analysis of the dynamics of a 2D lattice of coupled van der Pol oscillators in the regime of relaxation oscillations. It is shown that the influence of coupling leads to the shift of effective values of the control parameters of individual oscillators. The strong coupling can even cause the transition to bistable dynamics which is never observed in a single van der Pol oscillator. The numerically constructed phase-parametric diagram that takes into account the shifts of parameters shows that the bistability arises through the pitchfork bifurcation when varying the coupling strength. The lattice dynamics is analyzed when the control and coupling parameters are varied within a wide range, and the regime diagrams are constructed in the planes of system parameters. A new type of spatiotemporal pattern, a so-called ”labyrinth-like structure”, is found and described in detail. We also reveal for the first time and study a spiral wave chimera with a new kind of the incoherence core in the form of ”labyrinth-like structure”.

Spiral wave chimeras for coupled oscillators with inertia

We report the appearance and the metamorphoses of spiral wave chimera states in coupled phase oscillators with inertia. First, when the coupling strength is small enough, the system behavior resembles classical two-dimensional (2D) Kuramoto-Shima spiral chimeras with bell-shape frequency characteristic of the incoherent cores. As the coupling increases, the cores acquire concentric regions of constant time-averaged frequencies, the chimera becomes quasiperiodic. Eventually, with a subsequent increase in the coupling strength, only one such region is left, i.e., the whole core becomes frequency-coherent. An essential modification of the system behavior occurs, when the parameter point enters the so-called solitary} region. Then, isolated oscillators are normally present on the spiral core background of the chimera states. These solitary oscillators do not participate in the common spiraling around the cores; instead, they start to oscillate with different time-averaged frequencies (Poincar\'e winding numbers). The number and the disposition of solitary oscillators can be any, given by the initial conditions. At a further increase in the coupling, the spiraling disappears, and the system behavior passes to a sort of spatiotemporal chaos.

Synchronization features of target wave structures with an incoherent center

Abstract In the present paper we study numerically the interaction of two 2-dimensional networks each representing a lattice of coupled van der Pol oscillators. The isolated lattices can demonstrate spiral and target wave structures for the cases of no-flux boundary conditions and random initial conditions. We explore the effect of mutual synchronization of target waves and target wave chimeras for dissipative and inertial inter-layer coupling between the lattices and for local and nonlocal intra-layer coupling between the lattice oscillators. We show for the first time the possibility of complete synchronization of target wave chimera states, including synchronization of incoherent cores. Our findings demonstrate that there is a difference with synchronization of spiral wave chimera states in which incoherent cores are not completely synchronized. The obtained results can have an important application and can be particularly used to study the dynamics of cardiac muscle in biophysics.

Transition from spiral wave chimeras to phase cluster states

Photochemically coupled Belousov-Zhabotinsky micro-oscillators are studied in experiments and simulations. Generally good agreement between the experimental and simulated dynamical behavior is found, with spiral wave chimeras exhibited at small values of the time delay in the coupling between the oscillators, spiral wave core splitting at higher values, and phase cluster states replacing the spiral wave dynamics at the highest values of the time delay. Spiral wave chimera dynamics is exhibited experimentally for much of the time delay range, while spiral wave phase cluster states are exhibited more in the model simulations. In addition to comparing the experimental and simulation behavior, we explore the novel spiral wave phase cluster states and develop a mechanism for this new and unusual dynamical behavior.

Role of solitary states in forming spatiotemporal patterns in a 2D lattice of van der Pol oscillators

The behavior of the ensemble of coupled van der Pol oscillators is abundant when coupling parameters are changed. Incoherent and chimera-like regimes are observed at small values of the coupling strength parameter. Synchronization takes place with an increase in the coupling strength and coupling range parameters. Various chimera and solitary states are realised when the coupling strength parameter is sufficiently large. The single van der Pol oscillator is taken in the regime of relaxation oscillations. Therefore, the lattice may realise spiral wave and spiral wave chimera regimes. Besides, target wave and solitary state regimes are observed in the ensemble. Finally, the solitary state and solitary state chimera regimes are firstly shown for the lattice of coupled van der Pol oscillators.

Spiral and target wave chimeras in a 2D network of nonlocally coupled van der Pol oscillators

Abstract We study numerically autowave structures in a two-dimensional lattice of van der Pol oscillators for the cases of local and nonlocal coupling between the individual oscillators. It is shown that classical spiral wave and target wave regimes are observed in the network. When the nonlocal coupling between the elements is introduced, complex spatio-temporal structures, including chimera states, can be realized. We reveal and describe single- and multi-core spiral wave chimeras (SWC), as well as a novel type of chimera state which is based on target waves and called a target wave chimera (TWC). We investigate and compare the features of SWC and TWC incoherent cores. Finally, we study how the system dynamics changes when the coupling parameters are varied and discuss the impact of external noise on the observed wave structures.

Spiral and target wave chimeras in a 2D lattice of map-based neuron models.

We study the dynamics of a two-dimensional lattice of nonlocally coupled-map-based neuron models represented by Rulkov maps. It is firstly shown that this discrete-time neural network can exhibit spiral and target waves and corresponding chimera states when the control parameters (the coupling strength and the coupling radius) are varied. It is demonstrated that one-core, multicore, and ring-shaped core spiral chimeras can be realized in the network. We also reveal a novel type of chimera structure-a target wave chimera. We explore the transition from spiral wave chimeras to target wave structures when varying the coupling parameters. We report for the first time that the spiral wave regime can be suppressed by applying noise excitations, and the subsequent transition to the target wave mode occurs.

Chimera States With 2D Deterministic and Random Fractal Connectivity

We study the formation of chimera states in 2D lattices with hierarchical (fractal) connectivity. The dynamics of the nodes follow the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire model and the connectivity has the form of a deterministic or a random Sierpinski carpet. We provide numerical evidence that for deterministic fractal connectivity and small values of the coupling strength, a hierarchical incoherent spot is produced with internal structure influenced by the fractal connectivity scheme. The spot size is similar to the size of the coupling matrix. Stable spots can be formed for symmetric fractal connectivity, while travelling ones are found when the connectivity matrix is asymmetric with respect to the center. For fractal coupling schemes spiral wave chimeras are produced and curious stable patterns are reported, which present triple coexistence of coherent regions, incoherent domains and travelling waves. In all cases, the coherent domains demonstrate the lowest mean phase velocities $\omega$, the incoherent domains show intermediate $\omega$-velocities, while the travelling waves show the highest $\omega$-values. These findings confirm previous studies on symmetric deterministic hierarchical connectivities and extend here to slanted and random fractals.

Synchronization of spiral wave patterns in two-layer 2D lattices of nonlocally coupled discrete oscillators.

The paper describes the effects of mutual and external synchronization of spiral wave structures in two coupled two-dimensional lattices of coupled discrete-time oscillators. Each lattice is given by a 2D N×N network of nonlocally coupled Nekorkin maps which model neuronal activity. We show numerically that spiral wave structures, including spiral wave chimeras, can be synchronized and establish the mechanism of the synchronization scenario. Our numerical studies indicate that when the coupling strength between the lattices is sufficiently weak, only a certain part of oscillators of the interacting networks is imperfectly synchronized, while the other part demonstrates a partially synchronous behavior. If the spatiotemporal patterns in the lattices do not include incoherent cores, imperfect synchronization is realized for most oscillators above a certain value of the coupling strength. In the regime of spiral wave chimeras, the imperfect synchronization of all oscillators cannot be achieved even for sufficiently large values of the coupling strength.

Spiral wave patterns in a two-dimensional lattice of nonlocally coupled maps modeling neural activity

Abstract We investigate numerically the spatio-temporal dynamics of a 2D lattice of coupled discrete-time systems with nonlocal interaction. The individual map is given by a universal discrete system (the Nekorkin map) proposed for modeling the neural activity. The network behavior is studied for periodic and open boundary conditions. It is shown that for certain values of the nonlinear coupling parameters, rotating spiral waves and spiral wave chimeras can be observed in the considered lattice. We analyze and compare statistical and dynamical characteristics of the local oscillators from coherence and incoherence clusters of a spiral wave chimera.