Ehud Meron

A mechanism for creating spatiotemporal disorder, which was demonstrated in a periodically forced oscillatory Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, was investigated. The mechanism consisted of the creation of spiral-vortex pairs through a transverse instability of fronts in the vicinity of a nonequilibrium Ising-Bloch bifurcation. The amplitude equation model and the forced complex Ginzburg-landau equation was used to reproduce the experimental observations with numerical solutions. Experiments on a periodically forced Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical reaction show front breakup into a state of spatiotemporal disorder involving continual events of spiral-vortex nucleation and destruction.