Nonuniformly twisted states and traveling chimeras in a system of nonlocally coupled identical phase oscillators

Abstract

We explore the model of a population of nonlocally coupled identical phase oscillators on a ring (Abrams and Strogatz 2004 Phys. Rev. Lett. 93 174102) and describe traveling patterns. In the continuous in space formulation, we find families of traveling wave solutions for left-right symmetric and asymmetric couplings. Only the simplest of these waves are stable, which is confirmed by numerical simulations for a finite population. We demonstrate that for asymmetric coupling, a weakly turbulent traveling chimera regime is established, both from an initial standing chimera or an unstable traveling wave profile. The weakly turbulent chimera is a macroscopically chaotic state, with a well-defined synchronous domain and partial coherence in the disordered domain. We characterize it through the correlation function and the Lyapunov spectrum.