Synchronization in coupled oscillators with multiplex interactions

The study of synchronizations in coupled oscillators is very important for understanding the occurrence of self-organized behaviors in complex systems. In the traditional Kuramoto model that has been extensively applied to the study of synchronous dynamics of coupled oscillators, the interaction function among oscillators is pairwise. The multiplex interaction mechanism that describes triple or multiple coupling functions has been a research focus in recent years. When the multiplex coupling dominates the interactions among oscillators, the phase oscillator systems can exhibit the typical abrupt desynchronization transitions. In this paper, we extensively investigate the synchronous dynamics of the Kuramoto model with mean-field triple couplings. We find that the abrupt desynchronization transition is irreversible, i.e. the system may experience a discontinuous transition from coherent state to incoherent state as the coupling strength deceases adiabatically, while the reversed transition cannot occur by adiabatically increasing the coupling. Moreover, the coherent state strongly depends on initial conditions. The dynamical mechanism of this irreversibility is theoretically studied by using the self-consistency approach. The neutral stability of ordered state is also explained through analyzing the linear-stability of the incoherent state. Further studies indicate that the system may experience a cascade of desynchronized standing-wave transitions when the width of the distribution function of natural frequencies of oscillators is changed. At the critical coupling, the motion of coupled oscillators in high-dimensional phase space becomes unstable through the saddle-node bifurcation and collapses into a stable low-dimensional invariant torus, which corresponds to the standing-wave state. The above conclusions and analyses are further extended to the case of multi-peak natural-frequency distributions. The results in this work reveal various collective synchronous states and the mechanism of the transitions among these macroscopic states brought by multiplex coupling. This also conduces to the in-depth understanding of transitions among collective states in other complex systems.