Reluctant bifurcations organize synchrony breaking in hypernetworks

A new paper of Eddie Nijholt (Imperial College), Bob Rink (VU) and Sören von de Gracht (Paderborn) was published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. In this paper, the authors describe a new type of bifurcation, in which certain observables of a dynamical system synchronize and desynchronize extremely slowly. Such "reluctant" (de-)synchronization cannot occur in network systems, but the paper shows that it is ubiquitous in hypernetworks. Hypernetworks commonly occur as models in neuroscience, social science and ecology. The authors conjecture that reluctant bifurcations determine how synchrony emergences in such systems.