Interplay of coupling and common noise at the transition to synchrony in oscillator populations

Abstract

We consider a population of globally coupled oscillators driven by common noise. By applying the Ott-Antonsen ansatz and by averaging over the fast oscillations, we obtain analytically tractable equations for the noisy evolution of the order parameter. While noise always tends to synchronize the oscillators, the coupling can act against synchrony if it is repulsive. For identical oscillators, the fully synchronous state remains stable for small enough repulsive coupling; moreover it is an absorbing state which always wins over the asynchronous regime. For oscillators with a distribution of natural frequencies, we report on a counter-intuitive effect of dispersion of the oscillators frequencies at synchrony.