Size of the sync basin resolved.

Abstract

Sparsely coupled Kuramoto oscillators offer a fertile playground for exploring high-dimensional basins of attraction due to their simple yet multistable dynamics. For n identical Kuramoto oscillators on cycle graphs, it is well known that the only attractors are twisted states, whose phases wind around the circle with a constant gap between neighboring oscillators (θ_{j}=2πqj/n). It was conjectured in 2006 that basin sizes of the twisted states scale as e^{-kq^{2}} with the winding number q. Here, we provide numerical and analytical evidence supporting the conjecture and uncover the dynamical mechanism behind the Gaussian scaling. The key idea is that, when starting with a random initial condition, the winding number of the solution stabilizes rapidly at t∝logn, before long-range correlation can develop among oscillators. This timescale separation allows us to calculate the winding number as a sum of weakly dependent random variables, leading to a Central Limit Theorem derivation of the basin scaling.