Coupled oscillators, even identical ones, display a wide range of behaviours, among them synchrony and incoherence. The 2002 discovery of so-called chimera states, states of coexisting synchronized and unsynchronized oscillators, provided a possible link between the two and definitely showed that different parts of the same ensemble can sustain qualitatively different forms of motion. Here, we demonstrate that globally coupled identical oscillators can express a range of coexistence patterns more comprehensive than chimeras. A hierarchy of such states evolves from the fully synchronized solution in a series of cluster-splittings. At the far end of this hierarchy, the states further collide with their own mirror-images in phase space – rendering the motion chaotic, destroying some of the clusters and thereby producing even more intricate coexistence patterns. A sequence of such attractor collisions can ultimately lead to full incoherence of only single asynchronous oscillators. Chimera states, with one large synchronized cluster and else only single oscillators, are found to be just one step in this transition from low- to high-dimensional dynamics.

耦合振荡器，即使是相同的振荡器，也会表现出广泛的行为，其中包括同步性和不连贯性。2002 年发现所谓的嵌合状态，即同步和非同步振荡器共存的状态，提供了两者之间可能的联系，并明确表明同一集合的不同部分可以维持质量不同的运动形式。在这里，我们证明了全局耦合的相同振荡器可以表达比嵌合体更全面的一系列共存模式。这种状态的层次结构是从一系列集群分裂中完全同步的解决方案演变而来的。在这个层次结构的远端，状态进一步与它们自己在相空间中的镜像发生碰撞——使运动变得混乱，破坏一些集群，从而产生更复杂的共存模式。一系列此类吸引子碰撞最终会导致仅单个异步振荡器完全不相干。嵌合体状态，具有一个大型同步集群，其他只有单个振荡器，被发现只是从低维到高维动力学过渡的一个步骤。