Importance of packing in spiral defect chaos

KAPILANJAN KRISHAN

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California-Irvine, Irvine,

California 92697-4575, USA

E-mail: kkrishan@uci.edu

Abstract. We develop two measures to characterize the geometry of

patterns exhibited by the state of spiral defect chaos, a weakly

turbulent regime of Rayleigh--B\'enard convection. These describe the

packing of contiguous stripes within the pattern by quantifying their

length and nearest-neighbor distributions. The distributions evolve

towards a unique distribution with increasing Rayleigh number that

suggests power-law scaling for the dynamics in the limit of infinite

system size. The techniques are generally applicable to patterns that

are reducible to a binary representation.

Keywords. Spiral defect chaos; scaling.

PACS Nos 47.52.+j; 05.45.-a