Uniqueness of synchronized stationary equilibria in the Kuramoto mean field game

Abstract

The stationary Kuramoto mean field game models a population of phase oscillators that form synchronized Nash equilibria above a critical interaction strength. We prove that the synchronized branch is a unique smooth family of Nash equilibria emerging from the uniform state at the bifurcation: at each supercritical interaction strength the synchronized equilibrium is unique up to rotation of the torus, and converges smoothly to the uniform distribution as the interaction parameter decreases to the critical threshold. Both follow from our main technical result: the scalar self-consistency map is strictly concave, settling a conjecture of Carmona, Cormier, and Soner. The proof decomposes the second derivative of the self-consistency map into two sign-indefinite moments of the equilibrium--a cubic moment and a gradient moment--and controls their signs through sharp shape estimates for the value function, a pointwise geometric-mean monotonicity that determines the sign of the cubic moment via a cosine-skewness inequality, and a reflection argument combined with a correlation inequality for the gradient moment.