Irregular Liesegang-type patterns in gas phase revisited. II. Statistical correlation analysis

We present a statistical analysis of Liesegang-type patterns formed in a gaseous HCl-NH3 system by ammonium chloride precipitation along glass tubes, as described in Paper I [J. C. Torres-Guzman et al., J. Chem. Phys. 144, 174701 (2016)] of this work. We focus on the detection and characterization of short and long-range correlations within the non-stationary sequence of apparently irregular precipitation bands. To this end we applied several techniques to estimate spatial correlations stemming from different fields, namely, linear auto-correlation via the power spectral density, detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA), and methods developed in the context of random matrix theory (RMT). In particular RMT methods disclose well pronounced long-range correlations over at least 40 bands in terms of both, band positions and intensity values. By using a variant of the DFA we furnish proof of the nonlinear nature of the detected long-range correlations. Published by AIP Publishing.