Amplitude death and spatiotemporal bifurcations in nonlocally delay-coupled oscillators

Amplitude death and spatiotemporal oscillations are remarkable patterns in coupled systems. We consider a ring of n identical oscillators with distance-dependent couplings and time delay. The amplitude death region is the intersection of three stable regions. Employing the method of multiple scales and normal form theory, the stability and criticality of spatiotemporal oscillations are determined. Around the amplitude death boundary there exist one branch of synchronized oscillations, n - 3 branches of co-existing phase-locked oscillations, n branches of mirror-reflecting oscillations, n branches of standing-wave oscillations, one branch of quasiperiodic oscillations and two branches of co-existing synchronized oscillations. It is proved that amplitude death is robust to small inhomogeneity of couplings, and the stability of synchronized or phase-locked oscillations inherits that of the individual decoupled oscillator. For the arbitrary form of coupling functions, some general results are also obtained for the thermodynamic limit. Finally, two examples are given to support the main results.