Disorder induces explosive synchronization

Abstract

We study explosive synchronization, a phenomenon characterized by first-order phase transitions between incoherent and synchronized states in networks of coupled oscillators. While explosive synchronization has been the subject of many recent studies, in each case strong conditions on either the heterogeneity of the network, its link weights, or its initial construction are imposed to engineer a first-order phase transition. This raises the question of how robust explosive synchronization is in view of more realistic structural and dynamical properties. Here we show that explosive synchronization can be induced in mildly heterogeneous networks by the addition of quenched disorder to the oscillators' frequencies, demonstrating that it is not only robust to, but moreover promoted by, this natural mechanism. We support these findings with numerical and analytical results, presenting simulations of a real neural network as well as a self-consistency theory used to study synthetic networks.

References in corpus (9)

• Power-law distributions in empirical data
• Synchronization in complex networks
• Critical phenomena in complex networks
• Explosive Synchronization Transitions in Scale-free Networks
• Thermodynamic limit of the first-order phase transition in the Kuramoto model
• Explosive first-order transition to synchrony in networked chaotic oscillators
• Kuramoto model with frequency-degree correlations on complex networks
• Effects of degree-frequency correlations on network synchronization: universality and full phase-locking
• Networks of noisy oscillators with correlated degree and frequency dispersion

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Explosive synchronization in adaptive and multilayer networks
• Mean field theory of assortative networks of phase oscillators
• Explosive synchronization with partial degree-frequency correlation
• Cooperative behavior between oscillatory and excitable units: the peculiar role of positive coupling-frequency correlations