Scaling behavior in Spiral Defect Chaos

We find the evolution toward power-law scaling in the distribution of roll lengths and nearest-neighbor distributions in a weakly turbulent regime of Rayleigh-Benard convection, known as spiral defect chaos. The state has a bounded domain of wave vectors in Fourier space attributed to the flow being highly confined to two dimensions. Our results indicates the existence of power-law scaling in the unconstrained horizontal dimension. The techniques described are broadly applicable to other pattern forming systems as well.