Cluster Synchronization

Scientists Discover Exotic New Patterns of Synchronization. quanta

Strogatz and his graduate student Daniel Abrams, who now studies synchronization as a professor at Northwestern, reproduced the peculiar mix of synchrony and asynchrony in computer simulations of their own and explored the conditions under which it arises. Strogatz dubbed it the “chimera” state after a mythological fire-breathing monster made of incongruous parts. (Months earlier, Strogatz had written a popular book called Sync, about the pervasiveness of global synchronization.)

Cluster synchronization and isolated desynchronization in complex networks with symmetries. nature

Here we present a new framework and develop techniques for the analysis of network dynamics that shows the connection between network symmetries and cluster formation. The connection between symmetries and cluster synchronization is experimentally confirmed in the context of real networks with heterogeneities and noise using an electro-optic network.