Collective synchronization through noise cancellation.

Abstract

After decades of study, there are only two known mechanisms to induce global synchronization in a population of oscillators: Deterministic coupling and common forcing. The inclusion of independent noise in these models typically serves to drive disorder, increasing the stability of the incoherent state. Here we show that the reverse is also possible. We propose and analyze a simple general model of purely noise coupled oscillators. In the first explicit choice of noise coupling, we find the linear response around incoherence is identical to that of the paradigmatic Kuramoto model but exhibits binary phase locking instead of full coherence. We characterize the phase diagram, stationary states, and approximate low-dimensional dynamics for the model, revealing the curious behavior of this mechanism of synchronization. In the second minimal case we connect the final synchronized state to the initial conditions of the system.