Partial synchronization in populations of pulse-coupled oscillators

I study the long-term behavior of populations of nonlinear oscillators with all-to-all, noninstantaneous, pulse coupling. With fast enough excitatory coupling both the fully synchronized and the asynchronous state are unstable. In this case individual units fire quasiperiodically even though the network as a whole shows a periodic firing pattern. The behavior of networks with three or more units is different in this regard from that of two-unit networks. With inhibitory coupling the network can break up into a variable number of fully synchronized clusters. For fast inhibition the number of clusters tends to be large, while the number of clusters is smaller for slow inhibition. 1996 The American Physical Society.