Experimental Verification of Chimera States in Networks of Quadrature Oscillators

Abstract

Chimera is a condition in which part of the oscillators of a network are in mutual synchrony whereas the rest remain out of sync among themselves and with respect to the synchronous group. In general chimera states are not welcome. In order to understand the main causes and how to avoid chimera, the first step is to be able to reproduce such a state in an experimental framework. In this work, using numerical simulations, a careful search over the parameter space is carried out in order to find chimera states. In the sequel such information is used to reproduce the result on an experimental testbed. Good agreement between simulations and experiments were found. A key factor is the dispersion of natural frequencies and chimera was found for low dispersion (less than 0.5%) in networks with five oscillators.