Higher order approximation of isochrons

Phase reduction is a commonly used techinque for analysing stable oscillators, particularly in studies concerning synchronization and phase lock of a network of oscillators. In a widely used numerical approach for obtaining phase reduction of a single oscillator, one needs to obtain the gradient of the phase function, which essentially provides a linear approximation of the local isochrons. In this paper, we extend the method for obtaining partial derivatives of the phase function to arbitrary order, providing higher order approximations of the local isochrons. In particular, our method in order 2 can be applied to the study of dynamics of a stable oscillator subjected to stochastic perturbations, a topic that will be discussed in a future paper. We use the Stuart–Landau oscillator to illustrate the method in order 2.