Aging transitions of multimodal oscillators in multilayer networks

When individual oscillators age and become inactive, the collective dynamics of coupled oscillators is often affected as well. Depending on the fraction of inactive oscillators or cascading failures that percolate from crucial information exchange points, the critical shift toward macroscopic inactivity in coupled oscillator networks is known as the aging transition. Here, we study this phenomenon in two overlayed square lattices that together constitute a multilayer network, whereby one layer is populated with slow Poincaré oscillators and the other with fast Rulkov neurons. Moreover, in this multimodal setup, the excitability of fast oscillators is influenced by the phase of slow oscillators that are gradually inactivated toward the aging transition in the fast layer. Through extensive numerical simulations, we find that the progressive inactivation of oscillators in the slow layer nontrivially affects the collective oscillatory activity and the aging transitions in the fast layer. Most counterintuitively, we show that it is possible for the intensity of oscillatory activity in the fast layer to progressively increase to up to 100%, even when up to 60% of units in the slow oscillatory layer are inactivated. We explain our results with a numerical analysis of collective behavior in individual layers, and we discuss their implications for biological systems.