Disorder fosters chimera in an array of motile particles

TL;DR

This paper investigates how positional disorder in an array of coupled oscillators induces chimera states, revealing how static and dynamic disorder affect synchronization and transition times.

Contribution

It demonstrates that disorder in oscillator positions causes a transition from synchrony to chimera states and analyzes how motion and system size influence this transition.

Findings

Disorder leads to a transition from synchrony to chimera states.

Probability of synchrony depends on system size and disorder type.

Transition times scale with number of oscillators and their velocity.

Abstract

We consider an array of non-locally coupled oscillators on a ring, which for equally spaced units possesses a Kuramoto-Battogtokh chimera regime and a synchronous state. We demonstrate that disorder in oscillators positions leads to a transition from the synchronous to the chimera state. For a static (quenched) disorder we find that the probability of synchrony survival changes, in dependence on the number of particles, from nearly zero at small populations to one in the thermodynamic limit. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the synchrony gets destroyed for randomly (ballistically or diffusively) moving oscillators. We show that, depending on the number of oscillators, there are different scalings of the transition time with this number and the velocity of the units.