On the typical and atypical solutions to the Kuramoto equations

Abstract

The Kuramoto model is a dynamical system that models the interaction of coupled oscillators. There has been much work to effectively bound the number of equilibria to the Kuramoto model for a given network. By formulating the Kuramoto equations as a system of algebraic equations, we first relate the complex root count of the Kuramoto equations to the combinatorics of the underlying network by showing that the complex root count is generically equal to the normalized volume of the corresponding adjacency polytope of the network. We then give explicit algebraic conditions under which this bound is strict and show that there are networks where the Kuramoto equations have infinitely many equilibria.