Front Structures in a Real Ginzburg-Landau Equation Coupled to a Mean Field

Localized traveling wave trains or pulses have been observed in various experiments in binary mixture convection. For strongly negative separation ratio, these pulse structures can be described as two interacting fronts of opposite orientation. An analytical study of the front solutions in a real Ginzburg-Landau equation coupled to a mean field is presented here as a first approach to the pulse solution. The additional mean field becomes important when the mass diffusion in the mixture is small as is the case in liquids. Within this framework it can lead to a hysteretic transition between slow and fast fronts when the Rayleigh number is changed.Comment: to appear in J. Bif. and Chaos, 7 pages (LaTeX) 1 figur

Reentrant and Whirling Hexagons in Non-Boussinesq convection

We review recent computational results for hexagon patterns in non-Boussinesq convection. For sufficiently strong dependence of the fluid parameters on the temperature we find reentrance of steady hexagons, i.e. while near onset the hexagon patterns become unstable to rolls as usually, they become again stable in the strongly nonlinear regime. If the convection apparatus is rotated about a vertical axis the transition from hexagons to rolls is replaced by a Hopf bifurcation to whirling hexagons. For weak non-Boussinesq effects they display defect chaos of the type described by the two-dimensional complex Ginzburg-Landau equation. For stronger non-Boussinesq effects the Hopf bifurcation becomes subcritical and localized bursting of the whirling amplitude is found. In this regime the coupling of the whirling amplitude to (small) deformations of the hexagon lattice becomes important. For yet stronger non-Boussinesq effects this coupling breaks up the hexagon lattice and strongly disordered states characterized by whirling and lattice defects are obtained.Comment: Accepted in European Physical Journal Special Topic

Ordered and Disordered Defect Chaos

Defect-chaos is studied numerically in coupled Ginzburg-Landau equations for parametrically driven waves. The motion of the defects is traced in detail yielding their life-times, annihilation partners, and distances traveled. In a regime in which in the one-dimensional case the chaotic dynamics is due to double phase slips, the two-dimensional system exhibits a strongly ordered stripe pattern. When the parity-breaking instability to traveling waves is approached this order vanishes and the correlation function decays rapidly. In the ordered regime the defects have a typical life-time, whereas in the disordered regime the life-time distribution is exponential. The probability of large defect loops is substantially larger in the disordered regime.Comment: 8 pages revtex, 8 figure