Attractor crowding in Josephson junction arrays

Abstract

Large arrays of coupled nonlinear oscillators can suffer a noise sensitivity due to competition between huge numbers of coexisting states. We have found direct numerical evidence that a Josephson junction series array can exhibit attractor crowding. Thus, for the parameter values considered, no matter how small the noise level, there is a limit to the size of the array beyond which noise corrupts the in-phase dynamical state.