Invasion of Spiral Defect Chaos into Straight Rolls in Rayleigh-Be´nard convection.

For Rayleigh-Be´nard convection of a fluid with Prandtl number σapprox. 1, we report experimental results of the competition between two stable attractors—Ideal Straight Rolls (ISR) and Spiral Defect Chaos (SDC). For convection cells containing regions of both ISR and SDC, we show that the SDC region invades the ISR region with a time-independent front speed v(ε), where ε is the reduced Rayleigh number (R-R[sub c])/R[sub c]. © 2000 American Institute of Physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]