Landau Damping in the Kuramoto Model

We consider the Kuramoto model of globally coupled phase oscillators in its continuum limit, with individual frequencies drawn from a distribution with density of class Cn (n≥ 4). A criterion for linear stability of the uniform stationary state is established which, for basic examples in the literature, is equivalent to the standard condition on the coupling strength. We prove that, under this criterion, the Kuramoto order parameter, when evolved under the full nonlinear dynamics, asymptotically vanishes (with polynomial rate n) for every trajectory issued from a sufficiently small Cn perturbation. The proof uses techniques from the Analysis of PDEs and closely follows recent proofs of the nonlinear Landau damping in the Vlasov equation and Vlasov-HMF model.