Phase chimera states: Frozen patterns of disorder

Coupled oscillators can serve as a testbed for larger questions of pattern formation across many areas of science and engineering. Much effort has been dedicated to the Kuramoto model and phase oscillators, but less has focused on oscillators with variable amplitudes. Here, we examine the simplest such oscillators—Stuart–Landau oscillators—and attempt to elucidate some puzzling dynamics observed in simulation by us and others. We demonstrate the existence and stability of a previously unreported state which we call a “phase chimera state.” Remarkably, in this state, the amplitudes of all oscillators are identical, but one subset of oscillators phase-locks while another subset remains incoherent in phase. We also show that this state can take the form of a “multitailed phase chimera state” where a single phase-synchronous cluster of oscillators coexists with multiple groups of phase-incoherent oscillators.