title: A coupled map lattice model for rheological chaos in sheared nematic liquid crystals.
abstract: A variety of complex fluids under shear exhibit complex spatiotemporal behavior, including what is now termed rheological chaos, at moderate values of the shear rate. Such chaos associated with rheological response occurs in regimes where the Reynolds number is very small. It must thus arise as a consequence of the coupling of the flow to internal structural variables describing the local state of the fluid. We propose a coupled map lattice model for such complex spatiotemporal behavior in a passively sheared nematic liquid crystal using local maps constructed so as to accurately describe the spatially homogeneous case. Such local maps are coupled diffusively to nearest and next-nearest neighbors to mimic the effects of spatial gradients in the underlying equations of motion. We investigate the dynamical steady states obtained as parameters in the map and the strength of the spatial coupling are varied, studying local temporal properties at a single site as well as spatiotemporal features of the extended system. Our methods reproduce the full range of spatiotemporal behavior seen in earlier one-dimensional studies based on partial differential equations. We report results for both the one- and two-dimensional cases, showing that spatial coupling favors uniform or periodically time-varying states, as intuitively expected. We demonstrate and characterize regimes of spatiotemporal intermittency out of which chaos develops. Our work indicates that similar simplified lattice models of the dynamics of complex fluids under shear should provide useful ways to access and quantify spatiotemporal complexity in such problems, in addition to representing a fast and numerically tractable alternative to continuum representations.
authors.affiliation: The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, C.I.T. Campus, Taramani, Chennai 600013, India. kamil@imsc.res.in
authors.forename: S M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Kamil
authors.forename: Gautam I
authors.initials: GI
authors.lastname: Menon
authors.forename: Sudeshna
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sinha