English

A global synchronization theorem for oscillators on a random graph

Dynamical Systems 2022-09-28 v1

Abstract

Consider nn identical Kuramoto oscillators on a random graph. Specifically, consider \ER random graphs in which any two oscillators are bidirectionally coupled with unit strength, independently and at random, with probability 0p10\leq p\leq 1. We say that a network is globally synchronizing if the oscillators converge to the all-in-phase synchronous state for almost all initial conditions. Is there a critical threshold for pp above which global synchrony is extremely likely but below which it is extremely rare? It is suspected that a critical threshold exists and is close to the so-called connectivity threshold, namely, plog(n)/np\sim \log(n)/n for n1n \gg 1. Ling, Xu, and Bandeira made the first progress toward proving a result in this direction: they showed that if plog(n)/n1/3p\gg \log(n)/n^{1/3}, then \ER networks of Kuramoto oscillators are globally synchronizing with high probability as nn\rightarrow\infty. Here we improve that result by showing that plog2(n)/np\gg \log^2(n)/n suffices. Our estimates are explicit: for example, we can say that there is more than a 99.9996%99.9996\% chance that a random network with n=106n = 10^6 and p>0.01117p>0.01117 is globally synchronizing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2203.03152,
  title  = {A global synchronization theorem for oscillators on a random graph},
  author = {Martin Kassabov and Steven H. Strogatz and Alex Townsend},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.03152},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

9 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:04:03.823Z