Macroscopic dynamics of oscillator ensembles with communities, higher-order interactions, and phase lags

TL;DR

This paper investigates how phase lags and higher-order interactions influence the collective dynamics of coupled oscillator communities, revealing complex behaviors like oscillations, chaos, and multistability through reduced models.

Contribution

It introduces a low-dimensional model capturing the effects of phase frustration and higher-order interactions in community-structured oscillators, uncovering new dynamic regimes.

Findings

Oscillatory and chaotic synchronization emerge for certain phase lag values.

Multistability allows coexistence of fixed points and oscillatory states.

Phase lags significantly affect the system's macroscopic behavior.

Abstract

We study the effects of phase-frustrated, higher-order interactions in a system of coupled phase oscillators with two communities. We use dimensionality reduction techniques to derive a low-dimensional system of ODEs to describe the macroscopic behavior of the system. By analyzing this system we show that, in addition to the fixed point solutions present in a system of oscillators with higher order interactions and community structure only, the system also exhibits oscillatory or chaotic synchronization behavior for some phase lag values. Moreover, some phase lag values give rise to multistability of solutions, where both fixed point solutions and oscillatory or chaotic behavior of the order parameters can be observed, depending on initial conditions.