Community structure and multi-modal oscillations in complex networks.

In many types of network, the relationship between structure and function is of great significance. We are particularly interested in community structures, which arise in a wide variety of domains. We apply a simple oscillator model to networks with community structures and show that waves of regular oscillation are caused by synchronised clusters of nodes. Moreover, we show that such global oscillations may arise as a direct result of network topology. We also observe that additional modes of oscillation (as detected through frequency analysis) occur in networks with additional levels of topological hierarchy and that such modes may be directly related to network structure. We apply the method in two specific domains (metabolic networks and metropolitan transport) demonstrating the robustness of our results when applied to real world systems. We conclude that (where the distribution of oscillator frequencies and the interactions between them are known to be unimodal) our observations may be applicable to the detection of underlying community structure in networks, shedding further light on the general relationship between structure and function in complex systems.

Oscillatory threshold logic.

In the 1940s, the first generation of modern computers used vacuum tube oscillators as their principle components, however, with the development of the transistor, such oscillator based computers quickly became obsolete. As the demand for faster and lower power computers continues, transistors are themselves approaching their theoretical limit and emerging technologies must eventually supersede them. With the development of optical oscillators and Josephson junction technology, we are again presented with the possibility of using oscillators as the basic components of computers, and it is possible that the next generation of computers will be composed almost entirely of oscillatory devices. Here, we demonstrate how coupled threshold oscillators may be used to perform binary logic in a manner entirely consistent with modern computer architectures. We describe a variety of computational circuitry and demonstrate working oscillator models of both computation and memory.

Encoding via conjugate symmetries of slow oscillations for globally coupled oscillators.

We study properties of the dynamics underlying slow cluster oscillations in two systems of five globally coupled oscillators. These slow oscillations are due to the appearance of structurally stable heteroclinic connections between cluster states in the noise-free dynamics. In the presence of low levels of noise they give rise to long periods of residence near cluster states interspersed with sudden transitions between them. Moreover, these transitions may occur between cluster states of the same symmetry, or between cluster states with conjugate symmetries given by some rearrangement of the oscillators. We consider the system of coupled phase oscillators studied by Hansel et al. [Phys. Rev. E 48, 3470 (1993)] in which one can observe slow, noise-driven oscillations that occur between two families of two cluster periodic states; in the noise-free case there is a robust attracting heteroclinic cycle connecting these families. The two families consist of symmetric images of two inequivalent periodic orbits that have the same symmetry. For N=5 oscillators, one of the periodic orbits has one unstable direction and the other has two unstable directions. Examining the behavior on the unstable manifold for the two unstable directions, we observe that the dimensionality of the manifold can give rise to switching between conjugate symmetry orbits. By applying small perturbations to the system we can easily steer it between a number of different marginally stable attractors. Finally, we show that similar behavior occurs in a system of phase-energy oscillators that are a natural extension of the phase model to two dimensional oscillators. We suggest that switching between conjugate symmetries is a very efficient method of encoding information into a globally coupled system of oscillators and may therefore be a good and simple model for the neural encoding of information.