Dynamics of desynchronized episodes in intermittent synchronization

Intermittent synchronization is observed in a variety of different experimental settings in physics and beyond and is an established research topic in nonlinear dynamics. When coupled oscillators exhibit relatively weak, intermittent synchrony, the trajectory in the phase space spends a substantial fraction of time away from a vicinity of a synchronized state. Thus to describe and understand the observed dynamics one may consider both synchronized episodes and desynchronized episodes (the episodes when oscillators are not synchronous). This mini-review discusses recent developments in this area. We explain how one can consider variation in synchrony on the very short time-scales, provided that there is some degree of overall synchrony. We show how to implement this approach in the case of intermittent phase locking, review several recent examples of the application of these ideas to experimental data and modeling systems, and discuss when and why these methods may be useful.