Seminar by Malthe Skytte Nordentoft Nielsen

Volume-Induced Oscillations in Networks of Damped Oscillators

Malthe Skytte Nordentoft Nielsen, PhD Student, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Negative feedback loops often display a damped oscillatory behaviour and are found throughout nature. These oscillations can be sustained by coupling a damped oscillator to an external constant oscillator due to resonance phenomena, though a similar coupling between two damped oscillators often will lead to damped solutions. Here we show a novel coupling between two damped noisy oscillators, that enables us to generate stable oscillatory motion.

These oscillations are different from the otherwise familiar resonance effects, and we instead attribute it to a jump between constant sets of stable states for the individual damped oscillator. Expanding the system to a network of coupled damped oscillators, a self ordered phenomena arises where the system ends up in a geometric series with ordered transition in between different states. This effect illustrates how the power of many can cooperate, and create otherwise impossible motion for the single system.