Intermittency at the edge of a stochastically inhibited pattern-forming instability

A layer of ferrofluid under a static vertical magnetic field is submitted to a random vertical vibration which acts as a multiplicative noise on the Rosensweig instability. At low noise amplitude the Rosensweig instability onset is delayed and our experimental results are in good agreement with the theoretical prediction of Lücke et al. [1]. For larger noise, a new regime is found where peaks appear and vanish randomly in time. Statistical properties of the temporal evolution of the fluid surface are presented. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2003