Synchronized clusters in coupled map networks. I. Numerical studies.

We study the synchronization of coupled maps on a variety of networks including regular one- and two-dimensional networks, scale-free networks, small world networks, tree networks, and random networks. For small coupling strengths nodes show turbulent behavior but form phase synchronized clusters as coupling increases. When nodes show synchronized behavior, we observe two interesting phenomena. First, there are some nodes of the floating type that show intermittent behavior between getting attached to some clusters and evolving independently. Second, we identify two different ways of cluster formation, namely self-organized clusters which have mostly intracluster couplings and driven clusters which have mostly intercluster couplings. The synchronized clusters may be of dominant self-organized type, dominant driven type, or mixed type depending on the type of network and the parameters of the dynamics. We define different states of the coupled dynamics by considering the number and type of synchronized clusters. For the local dynamics governed by the logistic map we study the phase diagram in the plane of the coupling constant (epsilon) and the logistic map parameter (mu). For large coupling strengths and nonlinear coupling we find that the scale-free networks and the Caley tree networks lead to better cluster formation than the other types of networks with the same average connectivity. For most of our study we use the number of connections of the order of the number of nodes. As the number of connections increases the number of nodes forming clusters and the size of the clusters in general increase.