Many biological and chemical systems could be modeled by a population ofoscillators coupled indirectly via a dynamical environment. Essentially, theenvironment by which the individual elements communicate is heterogeneous.Nevertheless, most of previous works considered the homogeneous case only.Here, we investigated the dynamical behaviors in a population of spatiallydistributed chaotic oscillators immersed in a heterogeneous environment.Various dynamical synchronization states such as oscillation death, phasesynchronization, and complete synchronized oscillation as well as theirtransitions were found. More importantly, we uncovered a non-traditional quorumsensing transition: increasing the density would first lead to collectiveoscillation from oscillation quench, but further increasing the populationdensity would lead to degeneration from complete synchronization to phasesynchronization or even from phase synchronization to desynchronization. Theunderlying mechanism of this finding was attributed to the dual roles played bythe population density. Further more, by treating the indirectly coupledsystems effectively to the system with directly local coupling, we applied themaster stability function approach to predict the occurrence of the completesynchronized oscillation, which were in agreement with the direct numericalsimulations of the full system. The possible candidates of the experimentalrealization on our model was also discussed.
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