Chimera-like behavior in a heterogeneous Kuramoto model: The interplay between attractive and repulsive coupling

Interaction within an ensemble of coupled nonlinear oscillators induces a variety of collective behaviors. One of the most fascinating is a chimera state that manifests the coexistence of spatially distinct populations of coherent and incoherent elements. Understanding of the emergent chimera behavior in controlled experiments or real systems requires a focus on the consideration of heterogeneous network models. In this study, we explore the transitions in a heterogeneous Kuramoto model under the monotonical increase of the coupling strength and specifically find that this system exhibits a frequency-modulated chimera-like pattern during the explosive transition to synchronization. We demonstrate that this specific dynamical regime originates from the interplay between (the evolved) attractively and repulsively coupled subpopulations. We also show that the above-mentioned chimera-like state is induced under weakly non-local, small-world, and sparse scale-free coupling and suppressed in globally coupled, strongly rewired, and dense scale-free networks due to the emergence of the large-scale connections.