Basin of attraction determines hysteresis in explosive synchronization

Random complex networks

Exactly what is meant by a ‘complex’ network is not clear; however, what is clear is that it is something other than a random graph. Complex networks arise in a wide range of real social, technological and physical systems. In all cases, the most basic categorization of these graphs is their node degree distribution. Particular groups of complex networks may exhibit additional interesting features, including the so-called small-world effect or being scale-free. There are many algorithms with which one may generate networks with particular degree distributions (perhaps the most famous of which is preferential attachment). In this paper, we address what it means to randomly choose a network from the class of networks with a particular degree distribution, and in doing so we show that the networks one gets from the preferential attachment process are actually highly pathological. Certain properties (including robustness and fragility) which have been attributed to the (scale-free) degree distribution are actually more intimately related to the preferential attachment growth mechanism. We focus here on scale-free networks with power-law degree sequences—but our methods and results are perfectly generic.

Explosive synchronization as a process of explosive percolation in dynamical phase space

Explosive synchronization and explosive percolation are currently two independent phenomena occurring in complex networks, where the former takes place in dynamical phase space while the latter in configuration space. It has been revealed that the mechanism of EP can be explained by the Achlioptas process, where the formation of a giant component is controlled by a suppressive rule. We here introduce an equivalent suppressive rule for ES. Before the critical point of ES, the suppressive rule induces the presence of multiple, small sized, synchronized clusters, while inducing the abrupt formation of a giant cluster of synchronized oscillators at the critical coupling strength. We also show how the explosive character of ES degrades into a second-order phase transition when the suppressive rule is broken. These results suggest that our suppressive rule can be considered as a dynamical counterpart of the Achlioptas process, indicating that ES and EP can be unified into a same framework.

Disorder induces explosive synchronization

We study explosive synchronization, a phenomenon characterized by first-order phase transitions between incoherent and synchronized states in networks of coupled oscillators. While explosive synchronization has been the subject of many recent studies, in each case strong conditions on the heterogeneity of the network, its link weights, or its initial construction are imposed to engineer a first-order phase transition. This raises the question of how robust explosive synchronization is in view of more realistic structural and dynamical properties. Here we show that explosive synchronization can be induced in mildly heterogeneous networks by the addition of quenched disorder to the oscillators' frequencies, demonstrating that it is not only robust to, but moreover promoted by, this natural mechanism. We support these findings with numerical and analytical results, presenting simulations of a real neural network as well as a self-consistency theory used to study synthetic networks.