Strong desynchronizing effects of weak noise in globally coupled systems

In assemblies of globally coupled dynamical units, weak noise perturbing independently the individual units can cause anomalous dispersion in the synchronized cloud of the units in the phase space. When the noise-free dynamics of the synchronized assembly is nonperiodic, various moments of the linear dimension of the cloud as a function of the noise strength exhibit multiscaling properties with parameter-dependent scaling exponents. Some numerical evidence of this peculiar behavior as well as its interpretation in terms of a multiplicative stochastic process with small additive noise is provided. Universality of the phenomenon is also discussed.