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Secondary instabilities of hexagonal patterns in a Bénard-Marangoni convection experiment
Denis Semwogerere1, Michael F Schatz
1Center for Nonlinear Science and School of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0430, USA.
Abstract:
We have identified experimentally secondary instability mechanisms that restrict the stable band of wave numbers for ideal hexagons in Bénard-Marangoni convection. We use "thermal laser writing" to impose long wave perturbations of ideal hexagonal patterns as initial conditions and measure the growth rates of the perturbations. For epsilon=0.46 our results suggest a longitudinal phase instability limits stable hexagons at a high wave number while a transverse phase instability limits low wave number hexagons.
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