Paper detail

Turing instabilities from a limit cycle

The Turing instability is a paradigmatic route to patterns formation in reaction-diffusion systems. Following a diffusion-driven instability, homogeneous fixed points can become unstable when subject to external perturbation. As a consequence, the system evolves towards a stationary, nonhomogeneous attractor. Stable patterns can be also obtained via oscillation quenching of an initially synchronous state of diffusively coupled oscillators. In the literature this is known as the oscillation death phenomenon. Here we show that oscillation death is nothing but a Turing instability for the first return map associated to the excitable system in its synchronous periodic state. In particular we obtain a set of closed conditions for identifying the domain in the parameters space that yields the instability. This is a natural generalisation of the original Turing relations, to the case where the homogeneous solution of the examined system is a periodic function of time. The obtained framework applies to systems embedded in continuum space, as well as those defined on a network-like support. The predictive ability of the theory is tested numerically, using different reaction schemes.