Experimental and theoretical approach for the clustering of globally coupled density oscillators based on phase response.

We investigated the phase-response curve of a coupled system of density oscillators with an analytical approach. The behaviors of two-, three-, and four-coupled systems seen in the experiments were reproduced by the model considering the phase-response curve. Especially in a four-coupled system, the clustering state and its incidence rate as functions of the coupling strength are well reproduced with this approach. Moreover, we confirmed that the shape of the phase-response curve we obtained analytically was close to that observed in the experiment where a perturbation is added to a single-density oscillator. We expect that this approach to obtaining the phase-response curve is general in the sense that it could be applied to coupled systems of other oscillators such as electrical-circuit oscillators, metronomes, and so on.