Experimental Investigation of the Transition to Spatiotemporal Chaos with a System-Size Control Parameter
Figure 1
Two different laser cross-sections, shown on the left,
are used to generate two spatiotemporal chaotic (STC) patterns of different
sizes. and are horizontal (along the director) and
vertical, respectively. Each pattern is driven at a fixed voltage-control
parameter of .
The horizontal white bar in the lower-right corner represents a length of 100 ,
and the vertical white bar on the right, which we will argue, represents the
natural chaotic length scale for our experiments,
and corresponds to a length of 171.
The laser light transmitted through the sample is blocked from the detector
using an optical filter; the actual positions of the laser cross-sections within
the STC patterns are indicated by the white arrows.
