ABSTRACT
Isochronal synchronization is amongst the most intriguing collective behaviors observed in coupled chaotic oscillators and networks. The oscillators’ dynamics behave identically in time, despite time-delays in the coupling signals among them. Such a phenomenon has attracted the attention of researchers due to its potential applications in chaos-based communication schemes. From several studies in the literature, it seems established that two chaotic systems do not display stable isochronal synchrony when coupled exclusively through mutual delayed coupling. Since the first publications on chaos synchronization, much effort has been deployed in the development of devices and techniques that can support and sustain chaos-based communication. The influence of propagation delay is fundamentally related to the unidirectional or bidirectional nature of the communication scheme. More recent developments using three lasers show that isochronal synchronization is not only attainable under injection-locking effects. For coupling setups considering direct self-feedback, it is required that the systems feature chaotic dynamics regardless of the existence or not of delayed self-feedback.
