# Blinking chimeras in globally coupled rotators

## TL;DR

This paper investigates a novel blinking chimera phenomenon in a small ensemble of globally coupled rotators, revealing a dynamic death-birth process with stability analysis of chaotic and regular regimes.

## Contribution

It introduces the concept of blinking chimeras in Kuramoto oscillators with inertia and characterizes their rare events and stability properties.

## Key findings

- Identification of three types of blinking events.
- Quantitative analysis of stability in chaotic and regular regimes.
- Observation of a death-birth process in cluster dynamics.

## Abstract

In globally coupled ensembles of identical oscillators so-called chimera states can be observed. The chimera state is a symmetry-broken regime, where a subset of oscillators forms a cluster, a synchronized population, while the rest of the system remains a collection of non-synchronized, scattered units. We describe here a blinking chimera regime in an ensemble of seven globally coupled rotators (Kuramoto oscillators with inertia). It is characterized by a death-birth process, where a long-term stable cluster of four oscillators suddenly dissolves and is very quickly reborn with a new, reshuffled configuration. We identify three different kinds of rare blinking events and give a quantitative characterization by applying stability analysis to the long-lived chaotic state and to the short-lived regular regimes which arise when the cluster dissolves.