Analysis and characterization of complex spatio-temporal patterns in nonlinear reaction-diffusion systems

Two important classes of spatio-temporal patterns, namely, spatio-temporal chaos and self-replicating patterns, for a representative three variable autocatalytic reaction mechanism coupled with diffusion has been studied. The characterization of these patterns has been carried out in terms of Lyapunov exponents and dimension density. The results show a linear scaling as a function of sub-system size for the Lyapunov dimension and entropy while the Lyapunov dimension density was found to rapidly saturate. The possibility of synchronizing the spatio-temporal dynamics by analyzing the conditional Lyapunov exponents of sub-systems was also observed.