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.