Noise Effects on Synchronized Globally Coupled Oscillators

The synchronized phase of globally coupled nonlinear oscillators subject to noise fluctuations is studied by means of a new analytical approach able to tackle general couplings, nonlinearities, and noise temporal correlations. Our results show that the interplay between coupling and noise modifies the effective frequency of the system in a non trivial way. Whereas for linear couplings the effect of noise is always to increase the effective frequency, for nonlinear couplings the noise influence is shown to be positive or negative depending on the problem parameters. Possible experimental verification of the results is discussed.