The American Institute of Physics Journal, Chaos chose electrical and computer engineering assistant research professor Hossein Taheri’s paper as the Editor’s Pick. His publication “Synchronization behavior in a ternary phase model” was cited as a source for the “Nonlinear dynamics used to examine the ternary model of laser phase mode locking” in the June 2019 issue.

The paper analyzes a phase model with novel ternary coupling in the presence of quenched disorder and explores transitions to partial and complete synchronization. The results are compared with phenomenology of the ubiquitous Kuramoto model, which exhibits starkly different behavior. Treatment of the nonlocal ternary coupling in this limit sheds light on the model’s novel structure, which is in turn inspired by frequency comb generation in Kerr-nonlinear dispersive optical cavities.

“It was surprising that the hysteresis width, determining where desynchronization appears, grows with the number of oscillators,” said Taheri. “Usually more neighbors simplify establishing global synchronized behavior.”

Taheri joined the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering’s electrical and computer engineering department in July 2018. His research expertise includes nonlinear and ultrafast optics, synchronization phenomena and nonlinear dynamics, integrated photonics, and optical techniques for medical diagnosis. The group hopes their results will inspire further work on the model and its variants, and looks to use the theory as a guiding strategy for enhanced performance of robust microresonator-based optical frequency combs and furthering their applications