Zig-zag chaos - a new spatiotemporal pattern in nonlinear dynamics

In this paper we study a complex spatiotemporal pattern, identified as spatiotemporal chaos, bifurcating at the onset from a spatially uniform solution of a system of globally coupled complex Ginzburg Landau equations governing the weakly nonlinear evolution of four travelling wave envelopes. The Ginzburg Landau system is derived directly from the weak electrolyte model for electroconvection in nematic liquid crystals when the primary instability is a Hopf bifurcation to oblique travelling rolls. The chaotic nature of the pattern and the resemblance with the observed experimental spatiotemporal chaos in the nematic electroconvection of the nematic I52 are confirmed through a combination of techniques that include time series analysis of the amplitudes of the dominant modes, statistical descriptions and normal form theory, showing good agreement between theory and experiments.