Partially phase-locked solutions to the Kuramoto model

Abstract: The Kuramoto model is a canonical model for understanding phase-locking phenomenon. It is well-understood that, in the usual mean-field scaling, full phase-locking is unlikely and that it is partially phase-locked states that are important in applications. Despite this, while there has been much attention given to the existence and stability of fully phase-locked states in the finite N Kuramoto model, the partially phase-locked states have received much less attention. In this paper, we present two related results. Firstly, we derive an analytical criterion that, for sufficiently strong coupling, guarantees the existence of a partially phase-locked state by proving the existence of an attracting ball around a fixed point of a subset of the oscillators. We also derive a larger invariant ball such that any point in it will asymptotically converge to the attracting ball. Secondly, we consider the large N (thermodynamic) limit for the Kuramoto system with randomly distributed frequencies. Using some results of De Smet and Aeyels on partial entrainment, we derive a deterministic condition giving almost sure existence of a partially entrained state for sufficiently strong coupling when the natural frequencies of the individual oscillators are independent identically distributed random variables, as well as upper and lower bounds on the size of the largest cluster of partially entrained oscillators. Interestingly in a series on numerical experiments we find that the observed size of the largest entrained cluster is predicted extremely well by the upper bound.