Quantifying spatiotemporal chaos in Rayleigh-Benard convection

One of the biggest challenges of modern science is to gain further understanding of large spatially extended systems driven far-from-equilibrium. Such systems often exhibit spatiotemporal chaos yielding aperiodic behavior in both space and time that is difficult to characterize. Diagnostics based upon the Lyapunov exponents and eigenvectors are explored as a way to quantify spatiotemporal chaos in Rayleigh-Benard convection in an experimentally realistic cylindrical domain. This is done through large-scale parallel numerical simulations and the results are used to gain new physical insight into the behavior of spatiotemporal chaotic systems.