Asymptotic Phase-Locking Dynamics and Critical Coupling Strength for the Kuramoto Model

We study the asymptotic clustering (phase-locking) dynamics for the Kuramoto model. For the analysis of emergent asymptotic patterns in the Kuramoto flow, we introduce the pathwise critical coupling strength which yields a sharp transition from partial phase-locking to complete phase-locking, and provide nontrivial upper bounds for the pathwise critical coupling strength. Numerical simulations suggest that multi- and mono-clusters can emerge asymptotically in the Kuramoto flow depending on the relative magnitude of the coupling strength compared to the sizes of natural frequencies. However, theoretical and rigorous analysis for such phase-locking dynamics of the Kuramoto flow still lacks a complete understanding, although there were some recent progress on the complete synchronization of the Kuramoto model in a sufficiently large coupling strength regime (Dörfler and Bullo in SIAM J Appl Dyn Syst 10:1070–1099, 2011, Automatica 50:1539–1564, 2014; Ha et al. in Commun Math Sci 4:1073–1091, 2016). In this paper, we present sufficient frameworks for partial phase-locking of a majority ensemble and the complete phase-locking in terms of the initial phase configuration, coupling strength and natural frequencies. As a by-product of our analysis, we obtain nontrivial upper bounds for the pathwise critical coupling strength in terms of the diameter of natural frequencies, initial Kuramoto order parameter and the system size N . We also show that phase-locked states whose order parameters are less than N - 1 2 are linearly unstable.