Chimera states under genuine local coupling

Chimera states, important forms of spatiotemporal self-organization in ensembles of identical oscillators, have been found in a wide variety of systems, provided that the coupling between the oscillators was nonlocal or global. Therefore, it is generally assumed that a locally coupled oscillatory medium, as described by the complex Ginzburg–Landau equation (CGLE), does not support chimera states. Here we show an alternative mechanism that does indeed lead to chimera states in a purely locally-coupled system, namely the interaction of an oscillatory medium, in the present case the CGLE, with a bistable internal degree of freedom.