Revival of oscillation from mean-field-induced death: Theory and experiment

The revival of oscillation and maintaining rhythmicity in a network of coupled oscillators offer an open challenge to researchers as the cessation of oscillation often leads to a fatal system degradation and an irrecoverable malfunctioning in many physical, biological and physiological systems. Recently a general technique of restoration of rhythmicity in diffusively coupled networks of nonlinear oscillators has been proposed in [Zou et al. Nature Commun. 6:7709, 2015], where it is shown that a proper feedback parameter that controls the rate of diffusion can effectively revive oscillation from an oscillation suppressed state. In this paper we show that the mean-field diffusive coupling, which can suppress oscillation even in a network of identical oscillators, can be modified in order to revoke the cessation of oscillation induced by it. Using a rigorous bifurcation analysis we show that, unlike other diffusive coupling schemes, here one has {\it two control parameters}, namely the {\it density of the mean-field} and the {\it feedback parameter} that can be controlled to revive oscillation from a death state. We demonstrate that an appropriate choice of density of the mean-field is capable of inducing rhythmicity even in the presence of complete diffusion, which is an unique feature of this mean-field coupling that is not available in other coupling schemes. Finally, we report the {\it first} experimental observation of revival of oscillation from the mean-field--induced oscillation suppression state that supports our theoretical results.