Importance of packing in spiral defect chaos

We develop two measures to characterize the geometry of patterns exhibited by the state of spiral defect chaos, a weakly turbulent regime of Rayleigh-Benard convection. These describe the packing of contiguous stripes within the pattern by quantifying their length and nearest-neighbor distributions. The distributions evolve towards a unique distribution with increasing Rayleigh number that suggests power-law scaling for the dynamics in the limit of infinite system size. The techniques are generally applicable to patterns that are reducible to a binary representation