Chimera states on a flat torus

Abstract

Discovered numerically by Kuramoto and Battogtokh in 2002, chimera states are spatiotemporal patterns in which regions of coherence and incoherence coexist. These mathematical oddities were recently reproduced in a laboratory setting sparking a flurry of interest in their properties. Here we use asymptotic methods to derive the conditions under which two-dimensional chimeras, similar to those observed in the experiments, can appear in a periodic space. We also use numerical integration to explore the dynamics of these chimeras and determine which are dynamically stable.