Abstract

The onset of spatio temporal wave structures in macroscopic systems may often be understood in terms of universal dynamical descriptions. A concept which has been successful in diverse fields of application such as hydrodynamics and biology is that the behavior of a complex nonlinear system may be well described in terms of the interaction between a small number of normal modes. The evolution of the physical system is then represented by the finite set of coordinates of this modal expansion. The transition of the system from a steady state, which corresponds to closed curves in the phase space, to a weakly turbulent state follows the universal route of the development of nonlinear modulations [1].

© 1992 Optical Society of America