Transitory behaviors in diffusively coupled nonlinear oscillators.

We study collective behaviors of diffusively coupled oscillators which exhibit out-of-phase synchrony for the case of weakly interacting two oscillators. In large populations of such oscillators interacting via one-dimensionally nearest neighbor couplings, there appear various collective behaviors depending on the coupling strength, regardless of the number of oscillators. Among others, we focus on an intermittent behavior consisting of the all-synchronized state, a weakly chaotic state and some sorts of metachronal waves. Here, a metachronal wave means a wave with orderly phase shifts of oscillations. Such phase shifts are produced by the dephasing interaction which produces the out-of-phase synchronized states in two coupled oscillators. We also show that the abovementioned intermittent behavior can be interpreted as in-out intermittency where two saddles on an invariant subspace, the all-synchronized state and one of the metachronal waves play an important role.