Spatiotemporal Intermittency in Rayleigh-Bénard Convection

Abstract

The transition to spatiotemporal intermittency has been experimentally studied in Rayleigh-Bénard convection in an annular cell. The dynamics of the system has been analyzed by computation of the statistical distribution of turbulent and laminar regions. The results, which display features typical of phase transitions, are similar to those found in systems of coupled maps and in partial differential equations.