Rate of synchrony in locally coupled chains of relaxation oscillators

Motivated by reports of synchronous neural activity in the brain, and the use of relaxation oscillators as models of neuronal activity, we study synchronization in chains of locally coupled relaxation oscillators. We find that the average time to synchrony for a chain of n oscillators, is proportional to n/sup p/, where p is a parameter dependent value that is obtained experimentally and is observed to be less than 0.5.