Experimental evidence of community switching en route to global synchronization

Complex networks are made up of communities wherein dynamics occur. Here, a community is defined as an ensemble of identical Wien-bridge oscillators that are nearly synchronized. We explore experimental evidence of community switching, i.e., a subset of oscillators in a community synchronizing their frequencies to those of the other community. We demonstrate this phenomenon by varying the network connectivity and interaction strength. Employing Wien-bridge oscillators, we study experimentally, as well as in LTspice simulations, the phenomenon where an oscillator synchronizes its frequency to that of its neighboring community en route to global synchronization. Our results are in agreement with numerical simulations of the Kuramoto model reported by Kato and Kori in their novel work involving community switching [Phys. Rev. E 107, 014210 (2023)]. Due to the presence of noise, hysteresis is also observed in our experiment but not in LTspice simulations. Lastly, the onset of global synchrony for different topologies is studied.