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Stability of synchronous slowly oscillating periodic solutions for systems of delay differential equations with coupled nonlinearity

We study stability of so-called synchronous slowly oscillating periodic solutions (SOPSs) for a system of identical delay differential equations (DDEs) with linear decay and nonlinear delayed negative feedback that are coupled through their nonlinear term. Under a row sum condition on the coupling matrix, existence of a unique SOPS for the corresponding scalar DDE implies existence of a unique synchronous SOPS for the coupled DDEs. However, stability of the SOPS for the scalar DDE does not generally imply stability of the synchronous SOPS for the coupled DDEs. We obtain an explicit formula, depending only on the spectrum of the coupling matrix, the strength of the linear decay and the values of the nonlinear negative feedback function near plus/minus infinity, that determines the stability of the synchronous SOPS in the asymptotic regime where the nonlinear term is heavily weighted. We also treat the special cases of so-called weakly coupled systems, near uniformly coupled systems, and doubly nonnegative coupled systems, in the aforementioned asymptotic regime. Our approach is to estimate the characteristic (Floquet) multipliers for the synchronous SOPS. We first reduce the analysis of the multidimensional variational equation to the analysis of a family of scalar variational-type equations, and then establish limits for an associated family of monodromy-type operators. We illustrate our results with examples of systems of DDEs with mean-field coupling and systems of DDEs arranged in a ring.