Low-Dimensional Chaos in a Hydrodynamic System

A. Brandstater, J. Swift, Harry L. Swinney, and A. Wolf
Department of Physics
University of Texas, Austin
Austin, Texas 78712, USA

J. Doyne Farmer and Erica Jen
Center for Nonlinear Studies
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA

J. P. Crutchfield
Physics Department
Univeristy of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Abstract

Evidence is persented for low-dimensional strange attractors in Couette-Taylor flow data. Computations of the largest Lyapunov exponent and metric entropy show that the system displays sensitive dependence of initial conditions. Although the phase space is very high dimensional, analysis of experimental data shows that motion is restricted to an attractor of dimension <5 for Reynolds numbers up to 30% above the onset of chaos. The Lyapunov exponent, entropy, and dimension all generally increase with Reynolds number.

Citation

A. Brandstater, J. Swift, H. L. Swinney, A. Wolf, J. D. Farmer, E. Jen, and J. P. Crutchfield. "Low-Dimensional Chaos in a Hydrodynamic System." Phys. Rev. Lett. 51 1983: 1442.

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