Călugăru Dumitru, Totz Jan Frederik, Martens Erik A, Engel Harald
Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, J. J. Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK.
Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
Sci Adv. 2020 Sep 23;6(39). doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abb2637. Print 2020 Sep.
Onset and loss of synchronization in coupled oscillators are of fundamental importance in understanding emergent behavior in natural and man-made systems, which range from neural networks to power grids. We report on experiments with hundreds of strongly coupled photochemical relaxation oscillators that exhibit a discontinuous synchronization transition with hysteresis, as opposed to the paradigmatic continuous transition expected from the widely used weak coupling theory. The resulting first-order transition is robust with respect to changes in network connectivity and natural frequency distribution. This allows us to identify the relaxation character of the oscillators as the essential parameter that determines the nature of the synchronization transition. We further support this hypothesis by revealing the mechanism of the transition, which cannot be accounted for by standard phase reduction techniques.
耦合振子中同步的起始和丧失对于理解自然和人造系统中的涌现行为至关重要，这些系统涵盖从神经网络到电网等诸多领域。我们报告了对数百个强耦合光化学弛豫振子进行的实验，这些振子表现出具有滞后现象的不连续同步转变，这与广泛使用的弱耦合理论所预期的典型连续转变相反。由此产生的一阶转变对于网络连通性和固有频率分布的变化具有鲁棒性。这使我们能够将振子的弛豫特性确定为决定同步转变性质的关键参数。我们通过揭示转变机制进一步支持了这一假设，而标准的相位约化技术无法解释该机制。
