Collective Phase Sensitivity

The collective phase response to a macroscopic external perturbation of a population of interacting nonlinear elements exhibiting collective oscillations is formulated for the case of globally-coupled oscillators. The macroscopic phase sensitivity is derived from the microscopic phase sensitivity of the constituent oscillators by a two-step phase reduction. We apply this result to quantify the stability of the macroscopic common-noise induced synchronization of two uncoupled populations of oscillators undergoing coherent collective oscillations.