We present a detailed study of the effect of time delay on the collective
dynamics of coupled limit cycle oscillators at Hopf bifurcation. For a simple
model consisting of just two oscillators with a time delayed coupling, the
bifurcation diagram obtained by numerical and analytical solutions shows
significant changes in the stability boundaries of the amplitude death, phase
locked and incoherent regions. A novel result is the occurrence of amplitude
death even in the absence of a frequency mismatch between the two oscillators.
Similar results are obtained for an array of N oscillators with a delayed mean
field coupling and the regions of such amplitude death in the parameter space
of the coupling strength and time delay are quantified. Some general analytic
results for the N tending to infinity (thermodynamic) limit are also obtained
and the implications of the time delay effects for physical applications are
discussed.Comment: 20 aps formatted revtex pages (including 13 PS figures); Minor
changes over the previous version; To be published in Physica
