Traveling chimeras in oscillator lattices with advective-diffusive coupling

TL;DR

This paper investigates how adding advection to the coupling in a one-dimensional oscillator array induces moving chimeras and turbulent patterns, revealing complex dynamics and stable traveling wave solutions.

Contribution

It introduces advection into oscillator coupling, demonstrating its effects on chimera movement, turbulence, and the existence of stable traveling wave solutions.

Findings

Chimera patterns become mobile with advection.

Weak turbulence appears in moving chimeras.

Stable traveling wave solutions are identified.

Abstract

We consider a one-dimensional array of phase oscillators coupled via an auxiliary complex field. While in the seminal chimera studies by Kumamoto and Battogtokh only diffusion of the field was considered, we include advection which makes the coupling left-right asymmetric. Chimera starts to move and we demonstrate, that a weakly turbulent moving pattern appears. It possesses a relatively large synchronous domain where the phases are nearly equal, and a more disordered domain where the local driving field is small. For a dense system with a large number of oscillators, there are strong local correlations in the disordered domain, which at most places looks like a smooth phase profile. We find also exact regular traveling wave chimera-like solutions of different complexity, but only some of them are stable.