Arnol'd Tongues in Oscillator Systems with Nonuniform Spatial Driving

TL;DR

This paper investigates how spatially and temporally varying external drives influence synchronization in coupled oscillator systems, revealing the importance of spatial distribution and boundary conditions in controlling oscillator behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of Arnol'd tongues in spatially-coupled oscillators, extending understanding of synchronization control in complex systems with spatial structure.

Findings

Spatial drive distribution affects synchronization frequency ranges.

Boundary conditions significantly influence synchronization in CGLE models.

Low amplitude drives can synchronize a broad frequency range in emCGLE.

Abstract

Nonlinear oscillator systems are ubiquitous in biology and physics, and their control is a practical problem in many experimental systems. Here we study this problem in the context of the two models of spatially-coupled oscillators: the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (CGLE) and a generalization of the CGLE in which oscillators are coupled through an external medium (emCGLE). We focus on external control drives that vary in both space and time. We find that the spatial distribution of the drive signal controls the frequency ranges over which oscillators synchronize to the drive and that boundary conditions strongly influence synchronization to external drives for the CGLE. Our calculations also show that the emCGLE has a low density regime in which a broad range of frequencies can be synchronized for low drive amplitudes. We study the bifurcation structure of these models and find that they are very similar to results for the driven Kuramoto model, a system with no spatial structure. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for controlling coupled oscillator systems such as the social amoebae \emph{Dictyostelium} and populations of BZ catalytic particles using spatially structured external drives.