Imperfectly synchronized states and chimera states in two interacting populations of nonlocally coupled Stuart-Landau oscillators.

We investigate the emergence of different kinds of imperfectly synchronized states and chimera states in two interacting populations of nonlocally coupled Stuart-Landau oscillators. We find that the complete synchronization in population I and existence of solitary oscillators which escape from the synchronized group in population II lead to imperfectly synchronized states for sufficiently small values of nonisochronicity parameter. Interestingly, upon increasing the strength of this parameter further there occurs an onset of mixed imperfectly synchronized states where the solitary oscillators occur from both the populations. Synchronized oscillators from both the populations are locked to a common average frequency. In both cases of imperfectly synchronized states, synchronized oscillators exhibit periodic motion while the solitary oscillators are quasiperiodic in nature. In this region, for spatially prepared initial conditions, we can observe the mixed chimera states where the coexistence of synchronized and desynchronized oscillations occur from both the populations. On the other hand, imperfectly synchronized states are not always stable, and they can drift aperiodically due to instability caused by an increase of nonisochronicity parameter. We observe that these states are robust to the introduction of frequency mismatch between the two populations.