1997/02/20 by Reha V. Cakmur, David A. Egolf, Cakmur, Reha V. +5
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Fluid Dynamics and Turbulent Flows #Pattern Formation and Solitons (nlin.PS) #nlin.PS #patt-sol
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.patt-sol/9702003
4 pages, including 6 inlined figures; submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett; See http://milou.msc.cornell.edu for related movies
arxiv created 1997/02/20 · openalex publication_date 1997/02/20 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
For Rayleigh-Benard convection in a square cell with a fluid of Prandtl number one, we report experimental results on the transition between a stationary pattern of ideal straight rolls (ISR) and the spatiotemporal chaotic state of spiral defect chaos (SDC). In contrast to experiments in circular geometries, we found ISR states below a particular value of the control parameter and SDC states above this value. By characterizing the pattern with a global measure, the pattern entropy, we found that the transition from SDC to ISR showed similarities to phase transitions in equilibrium finite-size systems.