Noise-Induced Macroscopic Bifurcations in Globally Coupled Chaotic Units

Large populations of globally coupled identical maps subjected to independent additive noise are shown to undergo qualitative changes as the features of the stochastic process are varied. We show that, for strong coupling, the collective dynamics can be described in terms of a few effective macroscopic degrees of freedom, whose deterministic equations of motion are systematically derived through an order parameter expansion.