Ordered and Disordered Defect Chaos

Defect-chaos is studied numerically in coupled Ginzburg-Landau equations for parametrically driven waves. The motion of the defects is traced in detail yielding their life-times, annihilation partners, and distances traveled. In a regime in which in the one-dimensional case the chaotic dynamics is due to double phase slips, the two-dimensional system exhibits a strongly ordered stripe pattern. When the parity-breaking instability to traveling waves is approached this order vanishes and the correlation function decays rapidly. In the ordered regime the defects have a typical life-time, whereas in the disordered regime the life-time distribution is exponential. The probability of large defect loops is substantially larger in the disordered regime.