Chimera states - mythological monsters from mathematics arise in the real world.

The synchronization of coupled oscillators is a striking manifestation of self-organization that nature employs to orchestrate essential processes of life, such as the beating of the heart, and it has been observed in a spectacular range of systems in nature and technology. It was long thought that for a network of identical oscillators, synchrony or disorder were mutually exclusive steady states. But more than a decade ago, theoretical studies revealed the intriguing possibility of dynamical states, in which the symmetry of the oscillator population is broken into a synchronous and an asynchronous part – which were later dubbed chimera states. Today, both theoretical work and several experiments have demonstrated the emergence of chimera states – or broken synchronization – in a variety of settings, and many interesting. However, the question as of which role chimera states might play in the real world still remains open. I will give a brief introduction on synchronization theory, survey some results on chimera states including theory and their experimental verification in a mechanical system, and in the outlook discuss potential applications in biology and technology.