# An efficient approach to suppress the negative role of contrarian oscillators in synchronization

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a tit-for-tat strategy to mitigate the negative impact of contrarian oscillators on synchronization in complex networks, enhancing coherence even with inhibitory elements present.

## Contribution

It proposes an efficient method to suppress contrarians' negative effects in oscillator networks, supported by numerical simulations and theoretical analysis.

## Key findings

- The tit-for-tat strategy effectively increases synchronization.
- Contrarian oscillators' negative influence can be mitigated.
- The approach is validated through numerical experiments.

## Abstract

It has been found that contrarian oscillators usually take a negative role in the collective behaviors formed by conformist oscillators. However, experiments revealed that it is also possible to achieve a strong coherence even when there are contrarians in the system such as neuron networks with both excitable and inhibitory neurons. To understand the underlying mechanism of this abnormal phenomenon, we here consider a complex network of coupled Kuramoto oscillators with mixed positive and negative couplings and present an efficient approach, i.e. tit-for-tat strategy, to suppress the negative role of contrarian oscillators in synchronization and thus increase the order parameter of synchronization. Two classes of contrarian oscillators are numerically studied and a brief theoretical analysis is provided to explain the numerical results.