Continuous limit and the moments system for the globally coupled phase oscillators (Q1948778)

This paper studies the Kuramoto model of coupled oscillators. In the extensive literature concerned with this model, there are two versions that are studied: finitely many oscillators, described by a finite system of ordinary differential equations, and an infinite population of oscillators, described by partial differential equation (a continuous model). In this paper these two versions are rigorously related to each other, by proving that the \(N\)-dimensional Kuramoto model converges to the continuous model in the sense of probability as \(N\rightarrow \infty\), with a difference of order \(N^{-\frac{1}{2}}\). This is done by defining appropriate moment sequences corresponding to the phase distribution of the oscillators in both the finite and the continuous models, formulating both models in terms of the same system of ordinary differential equations for the evolution of these moments. Assuming that the initial conditions and the natural frequencies of the finite-dimensional model are randomly distributed according to the same distributions as those appearing in the continuous model, the moments of the finite-dimensional system are then shown to converge to those of the continuous one as \(N\rightarrow \infty\), for any fixed time \(t\).