Higher-order interactions lead to ‘reluctant’ synchrony breaking

To model dynamical systems on networks with higher-order (non-pairwise) interactions, we recently introduced a new class of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) on hypernetworks. Here, we consider one-parameter synchrony breaking bifurcations in such ODEs. We call a synchrony breaking steady-state branch ‘reluctant’ if it is tangent to a synchrony space, but does not lie inside it. We prove that reluctant synchrony breaking is ubiquitous in hypernetwork systems, by constructing a large class of examples that support it. We also give an explicit formula for the order of tangency to the synchrony space of a reluctant steady-state branch.