Statistics and scaling behavior of chaotic domains in a liquid crystal light valve with rotated feedback

An optical system containing a liquid crystal light valve and a two-dimensional feedback is known to form a wide variety of ordered and disordered spatial structures [Akhmanov et al., J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 9, 78 (1992)]. Here we describe a spatiotemporal feature—chaotic domains, obtained under temporal modulation of the input beam. We characterize these structures using a geometrical and a statistical approach. We find that the system retains low-dimensional dynamics locally while exhibiting spatiotemporal chaos. A power scaling relation between the size of the chaotic domains and the spatial coupling length of the system is also obtained from the experimental measurements. Good overall agreement is found between experimental results and the numerical integration of model equations.