Perturbation of Synchronized States via in situ Control of Individual Nodes and Edges

Understanding the dynamics of complex networks can be challenging due to the large number of variables that must be tracked. Substantial amounts of data processing is typically required to find correlations between the system degrees-of-freedom in order to intuit information flow. This is the case when the symmetry of the system breaks, as it implies that the network cannot be reduced to a single degree-of-freedom, e.g. the in-phase synchronized state of coupled phase oscillators. In a complex network, simultaneous perturbation of individual or multiple nodes/edges could be an important tool in the understanding of global state behavior. We demonstrate such a tool by probing the dynamics of symmetry broken synchronized states in a ring of 8 coupled nanomechanical oscillators. By employing individual edge and node control we reveal the nature of these broken symmetries.