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Updated: Nov 5, 2025

Assembly and Characterization of an External Driver for the Generation of Sub-Kilohertz Oscillatory Flow in Microchannels
Published on: January 28, 2022
Arnold tongues in oscillator systems with nonuniform spatial driving
Alexander Golden1,2, Allyson E Sgro2,3, Pankaj Mehta1,2
1Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA.
Abstract:
Nonlinear oscillator systems are ubiquitous in biology and physics, and their control is a practical problem in many experimental systems. Here we study this problem in the context of the two models of spatially coupled oscillators: the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (CGLE) and a generalization of the CGLE in which oscillators are coupled through an external medium (emCGLE). We focus on external control drives that vary in both space and time. We find that the spatial distribution of the drive signal controls the frequency ranges over which oscillators synchronize to the drive and that boundary conditions strongly influence synchronization to external drives for the CGLE. Our calculations also show that the emCGLE has a low density regime in which a broad range of frequencies can be synchronized for low drive amplitudes. We study the bifurcation structure of these models and find that they are very similar to results for the driven Kuramoto model, a system with no spatial structure. We conclude by discussing qualitative implications of our results for controlling coupled oscillator systems such as the social amoebae Dictyostelium and populations of Belousov Zhabotinsky (BZ) catalytic particles using spatially structured external drives.
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