Controlling Dispersive Chaos in Binary-Fluid Convection
26 July 1999
We report observations of stabilized traveling-wave (TW) convection in a regime in which the uncontrolled system exhibits repeated erratic growth and abrupt decay of spatially-localized bursts of TW. By applying as feedback a spatially-varying Rayleigh-number profile computed from the measured convection pattern, we suppress this behavior and stabilize states of unidirectional TW with spatially-uniform amplitude on the unstable branch of the subcritical bifurcation to convection. This allows us to measure the nonlinear coefficients of the corresponding quintic complex Ginzburg-Landau equation.