Rotating convection at moderate Prandtl number

A small rotation is shown to inhibit the spiral chaos which develops in Rayleigh–Bénard convection at moderate Prandtl number. Near the critical rotation for the onset of the Küppers–Lortz instability, large coherent targets embedded in a turbulence background are formed in the case of free-slip top and bottom boundary conditions, while in the case of no-slip boundary conditions, unfolding of the spirals is observed and, for periodic horizontal geometry, straight parallel rolls can reform