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A vortex sheet formalism is used to search for equilibrium shapes in the centrifugally driven interfacial elastic fingering problem. We study the development of interfacial instabilities when a viscous fluid surrounded by another of smaller density flows in the confined environment of a rotating Hele-Shaw cell. The peculiarity of the situation is associated to the fact that, due to a chemical reaction, the two-fluid boundary becomes an elastic layer. The interplay between centrifugal and elastic forces leads to the formation of a rich variety of stationary shapes. Visually striking equilibrium morphologies are obtained from the numerical solution of a nonlinear differential equation for the interface curvature (the shape equation), determined by a zero vorticity condition. Classification of the various families of shapes is made via two dimensionless parameters: an effective bending rigidity (ratio of elastic to centrifugal effects) and a geometrical radius of gyration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The embedding of a time series provides a basic tool to analyze dynamical properties of the underlying chaotic system. To this purpose, the choice of the embedding dimension and lag is crucial. Although several methods have been devised to tackle the issue of the optimal setting of these parameters, a conclusive criterion to make the most appropriate choice is still lacking. An accepted procedure to rank different embedding methods relies on the evaluation of the maximum Lyapunov exponent (MLE) out of embedded time series that are generated by chaotic systems with explicit analytic representation. The MLE is evaluated as the local divergence rate of nearby trajectories. Given a system, embedding methods are ranked according to how close such MLE values are to the true MLE. This is provided by the so-called standard method in a way that exploits the mathematical description of the system and does not require embedding. In this paper we study the dependence of the finite-time MLE evaluated via the divergence rate method on the embedding dimension and lag in the case of time series generated by four systems that are widely used as references in the scientific literature. We develop a completely automatic algorithm that provides the divergence rate and its statistical uncertainty. We show that the uncertainty can provide useful information about the optimal choice of the embedding parameters. In addition, our approach allows us to find which systems provide suitable benchmarks for the comparison and ranking of different embedding methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]