Is repulsion good for the health of Chimeras?

Abstract

Yes! Very much so. A chimera state refers to the coexistence of a coherent-incoherent dynamical evolution of identically coupled oscillators. We investigate the impact of multiplexing of a lyer having repulsively coupled oscillators on occurrence of chimeras in the layer having attractively coupled identical oscillators. We report that there exists an enhancement in the appearance of chimera state in one layer of multiplex network in the presence of repulsive coupling in the other layer. Furthermore, we show that a small amount of inhibition or repulsive coupling in one layer is sufficient to yield chimera state in another layer by destroying its synchronized behavior. These results can be used to get insight into dynamical behaviors of those systems where both attractive and repulsive coupling exist among their constituents.