Symmetry and phaselocking in chains of weakly coupled oscillators

Abstract Weakly coupled chains of oscillators with nearest‐neighbor interactions are analyzed for phaselocked solutions. It is shown that the symmetry properties of the coupling affect the qualitative form of the phaselocked solutions and the scaling behavior of the system as the number of oscillators grows without bound. It is also shown that qualitative behavior of these solutions depends on whether the coupling is “diffusive” or “I synaptic”. terms defined in the paper. The methods include the demonstration that the equations for phaselocked solutions can be approximated by a singularly perturbed two‐point (continuum) boundary value problem that is easier to analyze; the issue of convergence of the phaselocked solutions to solutions of the continuum equation is closely related to questions involving numerical entropy in computation schemes for a conservation law. An application to the neurophysiology of motor behavior is discussed briefly.