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Transition from Spatiotemporal Chaos to Ideal Straight Rolls in Rayleigh-Benard Convection

Reha V. Cakmur, David A. Egolf, Brendan B. Plapp, Eberhard Bodenschatz

patt-solarXiv:patt-sol/9702003

Abstract

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.

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