Pattern Formation And Solitons

The mean-field Kuramoto model for synchronization of phase oscillators with an asymmetric bimodal frequency distribution is analyzed. Breaking the reflection symmetry facilitates oscillator synchronization to rotating wave phases. Numerical simulations support the results based of bifurcation theory and high-frequency calculations. In the latter case, the order parameter is a linear superposition of parameters corresponding to rotating and counterrotating phases.

A quasi-2-dimensional stationary spot in a disk-shaped chemical reactor is observed to bifurcate to an oscillating spot when a control parameter is increased beyond a critical value. Further increase of the control parameter leads to the collapse and disappearance of the spot. Analysis of a bistable activator-inhibitor model indicates that the observed behavior is a consequence of interaction of the front with the boundary near a parity breaking front bifurcation.

We experimentally study compression of thin plates in rectangular boxes with variable height. A cascade of buckling is generated. It gives rise to a self-similar evolution of elastic reaction of plates with box height which surprisingly exhibits repetitive vanishing and negative stiffness. These features are understood from properties of Euler's equation for elastica.

We utilize the fractal dimension of the perimeter surface of cell sections as a new observable to characterize cells of different types. We propose that it is possible to distinguish cancerous from healthy cells with the aid of this new approach. As a first application we show that it is possible to perform this distinction between patients with hairy-cell lymphocytic leukemia and those with normal blood lymphocytes.

This paper considers properties of nonlinear waves and solitons of Korteweg-de Vries equation in the presence of external perturbation. For time-periodic hamiltonian perturbation the width of the stochastic layer is calculated. The conclusions about chaotic behaviour in long-period waves and solitons are inferred. Obtained theoretical results find experimental confirmation in experiments with the propagation of ion-acoustic waves in plasma.

A mesoscopic or coarse-grained approach is presented to study thermo-capillary induced flows. An order parameter representation of a two-phase binary fluid is used in which the interfacial region separating the phases naturally occupies a transition zone of small width. The order parameter satisfies the Cahn-Hilliard equation with advective transport. A modified Navier-Stokes equation that incorporates an explicit coupling to the order parameter field governs fluid flow. It reduces, in the limit of an infinitely thin interface, to the Navier-Stokes equation within the bulk phases and to two interfacial forces: a normal capillary force proportional to the surface tension and the mean curvature of the surface, and a tangential force proportional to the tangential derivative of the surface tension. The method is illustrated in two cases: thermo-capillary migration of drops and phase separation via spinodal decomposition, both in an externally imposed temperature gradient.

We address the striking coexistence of localized waves (`pulses') of different lengths which was observed in recent experiments and full numerical simulations of binary-mixture convection. Using a set of extended Ginzburg-Landau equations, we show that this multiplicity finds a natural explanation in terms of the competition of two distinct, physical localization mechanisms; one arises from dispersion and the other from a concentration mode. This competition is absent in the standard Ginzburg-Landau equation. It may also be relevant in other waves coupled to a large-scale field.

We study a class of generalized fifth order Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equations which are derivable from a Lagrangian L(p,m,n,l) which has variable powers of the first and second derivatives of the field with powers given by the parameters p,m,n,l. The resulting field equation has solitary wave solutions of both the usual (non-compact) and compact variety ("compactons"). For the particular case that p=m=n+l, the solitary wave solutions have compact support and the feature that their width is independent of the amplitude. We discuss the Hamiltonian structure of these theories and find that mass, momentum, and energy are conserved. We find in general that these are not completely integrable systems. Numerical simulations show that an arbitrary compact initial wave packet whose width is wider than that of a compacton breaks up into several compactons all having the same width. The scattering of two compactons is almost elastic, with the left over wake eventually turning into compacton-anticompacton pairs. When there are two different compacton solutions for a single set of parameters the wider solution is stable, and this solution is a minimum of the Hamiltonian.

We present experimental results for pattern formation in Rayleigh-Benard convection of a fluid with a Prandtl number, Pr~ 4. We find that the spiral-defect-chaos (SDC) attractor which exists for Pr~1 has become unstable. Gradually increasing the temperature difference from below to well above its critical value no longer leads to SDC. A sudden jump of temperature difference from below to above onset causes convection to grow from thermal fluctuations and does yield SDC. However, the SDC is a transient; it coarsens and forms a single cell-filling spiral which then drifts toward the cell wall and disappears.

Two front instabilities in a reaction-diffusion system are shown to lead to the formation of complex patterns. The first is an instability to transverse modulations that drives the formation of labyrinthine patterns. The second is a Nonequilibrium Ising-Bloch (NIB) bifurcation that renders a stationary planar front unstable and gives rise to a pair of counterpropagating fronts. Near the NIB bifurcation the relation of the front velocity to curvature is highly nonlinear and transitions between counterpropagating fronts become feasible. Nonuniformly curved fronts may undergo local front transitions that nucleate spiral-vortex pairs. These nucleation events provide the ingredient needed to initiate spot splitting and spiral turbulence. Similar spatio-temporal processes have been observed recently in the ferrocyanide-iodate-sulfite reaction.