Weak temperature gradient effect on the stability of the circular Couette flow

We have investigated the influence of a weak radial temperature gradient in a wide gap and large aspect ratio Couette-Taylor system. The inner cylinder is rotating and can be heated or cooled, the outer cylinder is at rest and immersed in a large thermal bath. We found that a radial temperature gradient destabilizes the Couette flow leading to a pattern of traveling helicoidal vortices occurring only near the bottom of the system. The size of the pattern increases as the rotation frequency of the cylinder is increased. We have characterized the spatiotemporal properties of the pattern and we have shown that it behaves as a wall mode found in the simulation of the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation with homogeneous boundary conditions.