Excitation of Spirals and Chiral Symmetry Breaking in Rayleigh-B�nard Convection

Spiral-defect populations in low-Prandtl number Rayleigh-B�nard convection with slow rotation about a vertical axis were measured in carbon dioxide at high pressure. The results indicate that spirals act like "thermally excited" defects and that the winding direction of a spiral is analogous to a magnetic spin. Rotation about a vertical axis, the spiral analog of the magnetic field, breaks the zero-rotation chiral symmetry between clockwise and counterclockwise spiral defects. Many properties of spiral-defect statistics are well described by an effective statistical-mechanical model.