INTERACTIONS OF RESONANCES AND GLOBAL BIFURCATIONS IN RAYLEIGH-BENARD CONVECTION Robert E. ECKE Los Alamos National Laboratory, LosAlamos, NM 87545a, USA
and loannis G. KEVREKIDIS Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA Received 24 November 1987; revised manuscript received 14 June 1988; accepted for publication 20 June 1988 Communicated by D.D. HoIm
We present detailed two-parameter experimental studies ofhysteresis and overlapping ofresonances and secondary Hopfbifur3He in superfluid 4He. The cations in the quasiperiodic regime of low-aspect-ratio Rayleigh—Benard convection in solutions of global bifurcations inferred from this experiment are similar to those observed in numerical studies of two-parameter families of maps of the plane with nonconstantjacobian.
The study of low-dimensional dynamic behavior and bifurcations in distributed systems through theory, computation, and experiment is an area of extensive research, particularly in the light of recent advances in the theory of dynamical systems. Rayleigh—Benard experiments in small-aspect-ratio convection cells put emphasis on the excitation of temporal degrees of freedom in a spatially coherent system and are thus ideal for the study of dynamical phenomena. In such systems, the experimental study of quasiperiodic states and the associated modelocking leading to chaos, has been of great recent interest [1—4].Theoretical interpretations of these experiments have been based primarily on 1 -D maps such as the standard circle map [51. The experimental results which we report here are incompatible with such 1 -D maps over a large region of parameter space. The results presented here and results of other experiments [3,41consist of complex dynamic behavior which necessitate comparisons with maps of two (or more) dimensions. We will show that there is good qualitative agreement between the bifurcation behavior of two-parameter families of maps of the plane [6—8] and the bifur344
cation behavior we observe experimentally in Rayleigh—Benard convection of 3He—superfluid 4He mixtures. For the two-dimensional maps these bifurcations involve global homoclinic and heteroclinic interactions of invariant manifolds of saddletype periodic solutions. Because of the close correspondence between the observed features of our experiment and predictions of numerical investigations we expect these low-dimensional mechanisms to also apply in our infinite-dimensional experimental system. Therefore, in the experimental regime under consideration here, the system follows no single standard route to turbulence [5,91.Instead, on any onedimensional path through the parameter space we expect, based on the results of Aronson et al. [61, to encounter a rapid alternation between regions where the attractor is smooth, where it has various degrees of roughness, and regions where it is downright strange. This rapid alternation between regular and chaotic regions is characteristic of the breakup of tori [101. We describe in this Letter a detailed experimental two-parameter investigation of the quasiperiodic regime of Rayleigh—Benard convection in dilute so-
lutions of 3He in superfluid 4He where the flow is characterized by two distinct frequencies [3]. This behavior is obtained after a sequence of transitions: from conduction to steady convection, to oscillatory convection (one frequency), to quasiperiodic convection via a Hopf bifurcation (two distinct frequencies) and finally through a hysteretic “jump” to a different quasiperiodic state. These transitions are described in detail by Haucke and Ecke [3]. The important qualitative dynamical phenomena in this regime include the existence of smooth invariant tori that either have quasiperiodic attractors winding around them (ratio of the two frequencies irrational) or are frequency-locked (ratio of the two frequencies rational). These periodic, frequency-locked solutions are referred to as resonances, and in a twoparameter study they exist in regions of parameter space called Arnol’d horns [11]. In this Letter we initially focus on the experimental observation and theoretical interpretation of hysteretic effects arising from the overlapping of resonances of different order. The overlapping of the horns implies the occurrence of global manifold interactions which break the quasiperiodic attractor we observe outside the resonance horns. We also experimentally observe secondary Hopf bifurcations (SHB) inside the Arnol’d horns, and discuss their occurrence in terms of two-dimensional maps. Finally, we use the analogy between the experiment and the map model to design further experiments for the elucidation of the system dynamics. The experiments were performed using a lowaspect-ratio convection cell (height h = 0.80 cm, length 2.00 x h and 1.40 x h) 4He filledat with a so3Hewidth in superfluid temperalution typically of 1.46% around 0.85 K. For the type of tures solutions that we examine, the system behaves as a single component fluid. The apparatus used in this experiment and the single component approximation for the solutions have been described in detail elsewhere [121. One dimensionless quantity underlying the development of instabilities in this system is the Rayleigh number R which is proportional to the temperature difference across the fluid layer. The second important dimensionless parameter in Rayleigh—Benard convection is the Prandtl number a, a ratio of the thermal to viscous diffusion times of the convecting fluid. In our experiment a is small