Symmetry breaking—the phenomenon in which the symmetry of a system is not inherited by its stable states—underlies pattern formation, superconductivity and numerous other effects. Recent theoretical work has established the possibility of converse symmetry breaking, a phenomenon in which the stable states are symmetric only when the system itself is not. This includes scenarios in which interacting entities are required to be non-identical in order to exhibit identical behaviour, such as in reaching consensus. Here we present an experimental demonstration of this phenomenon. Using a network of alternating-current electromechanical oscillators, we show that their ability to achieve identical frequency synchronization is enhanced when the oscillators are tuned to be suitably non-identical and that converse symmetry breaking persists for a range of noise levels. These results have implications for the optimization and control of network dynamics in a broad class of systems whose function benefits from harnessing uniform behaviour.

对称性破坏——系统的对称性不被其稳定状态所继承的现象——是图案形成、超导性和许多其他效应的基础。最近的理论工作已经确定了逆对称破坏的可能性，这是一种稳定状态仅在系统本身不对称时才对称的现象。这包括要求交互实体不同以表现出相同行为的场景，例如达成共识。在这里，我们提出了这种现象的实验证明。使用交流机电振荡器网络，我们表明，当振荡器被调整为适当地不同时，它们实现相同频率同步的能力得到增强，并且在一定范围的噪声水平下，逆对称破坏仍然存在。这些结果对在广泛的系统中优化和控制网络动态具有影响，这些系统的功能受益于利用统一行为。