Paper detail

Chimeras with uniformly distributed heterogeneity: two coupled populations

Chimeras occur in networks of two coupled populations of oscillators when the oscillators in one population synchronise while those in the other are asynchronous. We consider chimeras of this form in networks of planar oscillators for which one parameter associated with the dynamics of an oscillator is randomly chosen from a uniform distribution. A generalisation of the approach in [C.R. Laing, Physical Review E, 100, 042211, 2019], which dealt with identical oscillators, is used to investigate the existence and stability of chimeras for these heterogeneous networks in the limit of an infinite number of oscillators. In all cases, making the oscillators more heterogeneous destroys the stable chimera in a saddle-node bifurcation. The results help us understand the robustness of chimeras in networks of general oscillators to heterogeneity.