Amplitude Death: The emergence of stationarity in coupled nonlinear systems

When nonlinear dynamical systems are coupled, depending on the intrinsic dynamics and the manner in which the coupling is organized, a host of novel phenomena can arise. In this context, an important emergent phenomenon is the complete suppression of oscillations, formally termed amplitude death (AD). Oscillations of the entire system cease as a consequence of the interaction, leading to stationary behavior. The fixed points that the coupling stabilizes can be the otherwise unstable fixed points of the uncoupled system or can correspond to novel stationary points. Such behaviour is of relevance in areas ranging from laser physics to the dynamics of biological systems. In this review we discuss the characteristics of the different coupling strategies and scenarios that lead to AD in a variety of different situations, and draw attention to several open issues and challenging problems for further study.Comment: Physics Reports (2012

Reconstructing phase dynamics of oscillator networks

We generalize our recent approach to reconstruction of phase dynamics of coupled oscillators from data [B. Kralemann et al., Phys. Rev. E, 77, 066205 (2008)] to cover the case of small networks of coupled periodic units. Starting from the multivariate time series, we first reconstruct genuine phases and then obtain the coupling functions in terms of these phases. The partial norms of these coupling functions quantify directed coupling between oscillators. We illustrate the method by different network motifs for three coupled oscillators and for random networks of five and nine units. We also discuss nonlinear effects in coupling.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, 27 reference

Enhancing synchronization in chaotic oscillators by induced heterogeneity

We report enhancing of complete synchronization in identical chaotic oscillators when their interaction is mediated by a mismatched oscillator. The identical oscillators now interact indirectly through the intermediate relay oscillator. The induced heterogeneity in the intermediate oscillator plays a constructive role in reducing the critical coupling for a transition to complete synchronization. A common lag synchronization emerges between the mismatched relay oscillator and its neighboring identical oscillators that leads to this enhancing effect. We present examples of one-dimensional open array, a ring, a star network and a two-dimensional lattice of dynamical systems to demonstrate how this enhancing effect occurs. The paradigmatic R\"ossler oscillator is used as a dynamical unit, in our numerical experiment, for different networks to reveal the enhancing phenomenon.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure