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Updated: Aug 14, 2025

Fabrication and Testing of Microfluidic Optomechanical Oscillators
Published on: May 29, 2014
Noise facilitates entrainment of a population of uncoupled limit cycle oscillators
Vojtech Kumpost1,2, Lennart Hilbert2,3, Ralf Mikut1
1Institute for Automation and Applied Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany.
Abstract:
Many biological oscillators share two properties: they are subject to stochastic fluctuations (noise) and they must reliably adjust their period to changing environmental conditions (entrainment). While noise seems to distort the ability of single oscillators to entrain, in populations of uncoupled oscillators noise allows population-level entrainment for a wider range of input amplitudes and periods. Here, we investigate how this effect depends on the noise intensity and the number of oscillators in the population. We have found that, if a population consists of a sufficient number of oscillators, increasing noise intensity leads to faster entrainment after a phase change of the input signal (jet lag) and increases sensitivity to low-amplitude input signals.
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