Global interactions, information flow, and chaos synchronization.

We investigate the relationship between the emergence of chaos synchronization and the information flow in dynamical systems possessing homogeneous or heterogeneous global interactions whose origin can be external (driven systems) or internal (autonomous systems). By employing general models of coupled chaotic maps for such systems, we show that the presence of a homogeneous global field, either external or internal, for all times is not indispensable for achieving complete or generalized synchronization in a system of chaotic elements. Complete synchronization can also appear with heterogeneous global fields; it does not requires the simultaneous sharing of the field by all the elements in a system. We use the normalized mutual information and the information transfer between global and local variables to characterize complete and generalized synchronization. We show that these information measures can characterize both types of synchronized states and also allow us to discern the origin of a global interaction field. A synchronization state emerges when a sufficient amount of information provided by a field is shared by all the elements in the system, on the average over long times. Thus, the maximum value of the top-down information transfer can be used as a predictor of synchronization in a system, as a parameter is varied.