Isolated Spiral Solutions of the Ginzburg–Landau Equation

Using finite element simulation, we study the main features of rotating wave solutions of the cubic complex Ginzburg–Landau equation. To focus on the characteristics of the waves themselves, we have used a circular domain to avoid the effects of irregular boundaries; we have inhibited the formation of defects using an Archimedean wave centered at the origin as the initial condition, and we have chosen a domain size long enough to contain several spiral arms but not so long as to promote long-wave instabilities. This allows us to focus on the geometric features of the solutions often overlooked in traditional works with random initial conditions in large domains. We show with our simulations that the convective and absolute stabilities differ from those predicted for plane waves. Likewise, we show that the appearance of spirals and anti-spirals can occur in any of the quadrants of the parameter space and depends fundamentally on the initial conditions. Finally, regarding the stability of spiral waves against sideband disturbances, we show that the persistence of two-dimensional spiral waves, if fulfilled, does not correspond to the Eckhaus criterion. Our simulations allow us to corroborate the idea that two-dimensional spirals depend on the size of the domain and that they require new analytical results whose trends are identified in this work.