Oscillator-phase coupling for different two-dimensional network connectivities.

We investigate the dynamics of large arrays of coupled phase oscillators driven by random intrinsic frequencies under a variety of coupling schemes, by computing the time-dependent cross-correlation function numerically for a two-dimensional array consisting of 128 X 128 oscillators as well as analytically for a simpler model. Our analysis shows that for overall equal interaction strength, a sparse-coupling scheme in which each oscillator is coupled to a small, randomly selected subset of its neighbors leads to a more rapid and robust phase locking than nearest-neighbor coupling or locally dense connection schemes.