Competitive suppression of synchronization and nonmonotonic transitions in oscillator communities with distributed time delay

Abstract

Community structure and interaction delays are common features of ensembles of network coupled oscillators, but their combined effect on the emergence of synchronization has not been studied in detail. We study the transitions between macroscopic states in coupled oscillator systems with community structure and time delays. We show that the combination of these two properties gives rise to nonmonotonic transitions, whereby increasing the global coupling strength can both inhibit and promote synchronization, yielding both desynchronization and synchronization transitions. For relatively wide parameter choices, we also observe asymmetric suppression of synchronization, where communities compete to suppress one another's synchronization properties until one or more win, totally suppressing the others to effective incoherence. Using the ansatz of Ott and Antonsen, we provide analytical descriptions for these transitions that confirm numerical simulations.