Chaos suppression and desynchronization phenomena in periodically coupled pendula subjected to localized heterogeneous forces

The suppressory effects of localized heterogeneous periodic pulses on the chaotic behaviour of sinusoidally coupled nonlinear pendula are studied. We assume that when the pendula are driven synchronously, i.e., all driving pulses have the same waveform, the chains display chaotic dynamics. It is shown that decreasing the impulse transmitted by the pulses of a minimal number of pendula results in regularization with the whole array exhibiting frequency synchronization over a wide range of coupling periods. These findings demonstrate that decreasing the impulse transmitted by localized external forces can tame chaos and lead to frequency-locked states in networks of periodically coupled dissipative systems.