Observation of a Fast Rotating Wave in Rings of Coupled Chaotic Oscillators

We report on the discovery of a transition in rings of coupled electronic circuits in the chaotic regime to a collective periodic state characterized by a time scale that is between two and three orders faster than that corresponding to an isolated circuit. This transition arises from a linear instability in the uniform synchronized state of the ring through a symmetric Hopf bifurcation. The same type of transition is also observed for other coupled chaotic systems, e.g., a ring of Lorenz attractors.