Power-law persistence characterizes traveling waves in coupled circle maps with repulsive coupling.

We study persistence in coupled circle maps with repulsive (inhibitory) coupling, and find that it offers an effective way to characterize the synchronous, traveling wave and spatiotemporally chaotic states of the system. In the traveling wave state, persistence decays as a power law and, in contrast to earlier observations in dynamical systems, this power-law scaling does not occur at the transition point alone, but over the entire dynamical phase (with the same exponent). We give a cellular automata model displaying the qualitative features of the traveling wave regime and provide an argument based on the theory of Motzkin numbers in combinatorics to explain the observed scaling.