Asymptotic formation and orbital stability of phase-locked states for the Kuramoto model (Q423036)

The paper investigates the onset of the phase-locked regime in the Kuramoto model of globally-coupled non-identical phase oscillators. For this, the coupling suffices to be strong enough, and its lower boundary is shown to depend on the diameters of the initial distributions of the natural frequencies and phases. The phases can be distributed over a half circle, which extends the previous results. In this case the convergence of the phases towards a phase-locked state consists of two stages: a transition to a narrow phase distribution within a quarter of a circle in a finite time, which is followed by an exponential relaxation to the asymptotic phase-locked state. The later is proved to be orbitally stable, where the Kuramoto flow is contracting in the 1-norm, and the perturbations decay while preserving the initial shift of the mean phases. The diameter of the phase-locked state is shown to be inversely proportional to the coupling strength, where the phases of fast oscillators advance those of slow ones. The paper also estimates the number of pairwise collisions which the phases undergo in a finite time during the transient and provides the lower-upper bounds for the phase differences. The analytical results are illustrated by numerical simulations.