Effects of propagation delay in coupled oscillators under direct-indirect coupling: Theory and experiment

Propagation delay arises in a coupling channel due to the finite propagation speed of signals and the dispersive nature of the channel. In this paper, we study the effects of propagation delay that appears in the indirect coupling path of direct (diffusive)-indirect (environmental) coupled oscillators. In sharp contrast to the direct coupled oscillators where propagation delay induces amplitude death, we show that in the case of direct-indirect coupling, even a small propagation delay is conducive to an oscillatory behavior. It is well known that simultaneous application of direct and indirect coupling is the general mechanism for amplitude death. However, here we show that the presence of propagation delay hinders the death state and helps the revival of oscillation. We demonstrate our results by considering chaotic time-delayed oscillators and FitzHugh-Nagumo oscillators. We use linear stability analysis to derive the explicit conditions for the onset of oscillation from the death state. We also verify the robustness of our results in an electronic hardware level experiment. Our study reveals that the effect of time delay on the dynamics of coupled oscillators is coupling function dependent and, therefore, highly non-trivial.