Synchronization of Kuramoto Oscillators in Dense Networks

Jianfeng Lu, Stefan Steinerberger

Published 2019-11-27Version 1

We study synchronization properties of systems of Kuramoto oscillators. The problem can also be understood as a question about the properties of an energy landscape created by a graph. More formally, let $G=(V,E)$ be a connected graph and $(a_{ij})_{i,j=1}^{n}$ denotes its adjacency matrix. Let the function $f:\mathbb{T}^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ be given by $$ f(\theta_1, \dots, \theta_n) = \sum_{i,j=1}^{n}{ a_{ij} \cos{(\theta_i - \theta_j)}}.$$ This function has a global maximum when $\theta_i = \theta$ for all $1\leq i \leq n$. It is known that if every vertex is connected to at least $\mu(n-1)$ other vertices for $\mu$ sufficiently large, then every local maximum is global. Taylor proved this for $\mu \geq 0.9395$ and Ling, Xu \& Bandeira improved this to $\mu \geq 0.7929$. We give a slight improvement to $\mu \geq 0.7889$. Townsend, Stillman \& Strogatz suggested that the critical value might be $\mu_c = 0.75$.