Coexistence of Coherence and Incoherence in Nonlocally Coupled Phase Oscillators

The phase oscillator model with global coupling is extended to the case of finite-range nonlocal coupling. Under suitable conditions, peculiar patterns emerge in which a quasi-continuous array of identical oscillators separates sharply into two domains, one composed of mutually synchronized oscillators with unique frequency and the other composed of desynchronized oscillators with distributed frequencies. We apply a theory similar to the one which successfully explained the onset of collective synchronization in globally coupled phase oscillators with frequency distribution. A space-dependent order parameter is thus introduced, and an exact functional self-consistency equation is derived for this quantity. Its numerical solution is confirmed to reproduce the simulation results accurately.