Glassy states and super-relaxation in populations of coupled phase oscillators.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 24947553.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms5118 and PMC identifier 4083435.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Large networks of coupled oscillators appear in many branches of science, so that the kinds of phenomena they exhibit are not only of intrinsic interest but also of very wide importance. In 1975, Kuramoto proposed an analytically tractable model to describe these systems, which has since been successfully applied in many contexts and remains a subject of intensive research. Some related problems, however, remain unclarified for decades, such as the existence and properties of the oscillator glass state. Here we present a detailed analysis of a very general form of the Kuramoto model. In particular, we find the conditions when it can exhibit glassy behaviour, which represents a kind of synchronous disorder in the present case. Furthermore, we discover a new and intriguing phenomenon that we refer to as super-relaxation where the oscillators feel no interaction at all while relaxing to incoherence. Our findings offer the possibility of creating glassy states and observing super-relaxation in real systems.