Interhyperhedral diffusion in Josephson-junction arrays

Abstract

We study the phase space for arrays of coupled Josephson-junction oscillators which have coexisting in-phase and antiphase attractors. Arrays with four or more oscillators have significantly different attracting sets from those with two or three: Continuous families of out-of-phase attractors can exist instead of isolated ones. A new mechanism in the presence of small amplitude noise is proposed to account for the observed transitions among different stable antiphase states, and the rarely observed transitions between an in-phase and an antiphase attractor.