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Kuramoto model of synchronization: Equilibrium and nonequilibrium aspects

Recently, there has been considerable interest in the study of spontaneous synchronization, particularly within the framework of the Kuramoto model. The model comprises oscillators with distributed natural frequencies interacting through a mean-field coupling, and serves as a paradigm to study synchronization. In this review, we put forward a general framework in which we discuss in a unified way known results with more recent developments obtained for a generalized Kuramoto model that includes inertial effects and noise. We describe the model from a different perspective, highlighting the long-range nature of the interaction between the oscillators, and emphasizing the equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium aspects of its dynamics from a statistical physics point of view. In the first main section, we introduce the model and discuss for the noiseless and noisy dynamics and unimodal frequency distributions the synchronization transition that occurs in the stationary state. In the second section, we introduce the generalized model, and discuss its synchronization phase diagram for unimodal frequency distributions. In the third section, we describe deviations from the mean-field setting of the Kuramoto model by considering the generalized dynamics on a one-dimensional periodic lattice on the sites of which the oscillators reside and interact with a coupling that decays as an inverse power-law of their separation. For two specific cases, namely, in the absence of noise and inertia, and in the case when the natural frequencies are the same for all the oscillators, we discuss how the long-time transition to synchrony is governed by the dynamics of the mean-field mode (zero Fourier mode) of the spatial distribution of the oscillator phases.