Expander graphs are globally synchronizing

Abstract: The Kuramoto model is fundamental to the study of synchronization. It consists of a collection of oscillators with interactions given by a network, which we identify respectively with vertices and edges of a graph. In this paper, we show that a graph with sufficient expansion must be globally synchronizing, meaning that a homogeneous Kuramoto model of identical oscillators on such a graph will converge to the fully synchronized state with all the oscillators having the same phase, for every initial state up to a set of measure zero. In particular, we show that for any $\varepsilon > 0$ and $p \geq (1 + \varepsilon) (\log n) / n$, the homogeneous Kuramoto model on the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graph $G(n, p)$ is globally synchronizing with probability tending to one as $n$ goes to infinity. This improves on a previous result of Kassabov, Strogatz, and Townsend and solves a conjecture of Ling, Xu, and Bandeira. We also show that the model is globally synchronizing on any $d$-regular Ramanujan graph, and on typical $d$-regular graphs, for large enough degree $d$.