Explosive Synchronization and Emergence of Assortativity on Adaptive Networks

We report an explosive transition from incoherence to synchronization of coupled phase oscillators on adaptive networks, following an Achlioptas process based on dynamic clustering information. During each adaptive step of the network topology, a portion of the links is randomly removed and the same amount of new links is generated following the so-called product rules (PRs) applied to the dynamic clusters. Particularly, two types of PRs are considered, namely, the min-PR and max-PR. We demonstrate that the synchronization transition becomes explosive in both cases. Interestingly, we find that the min-PR rule can lead to disassortativity of the network topology, while the max-PR rule leads to assortativity.