Pitchfork bifurcations in small aspect ratio Taylor-Couette flow

We present a discussion of steady bifurcation phenomena in Taylor-Couette flow. The emphasis is on the role of pitchfork bifurcations in mathematical models and their relevance to the physical problem. The general features of such bifurcations are reviewed before we discuss the numerical and experimental techniques used to explore their properties. New results are then presented for a wide-gap small aspect ratio version of Taylor-Couette flow. We find good agreement between numerical and experimental results and show that the qualitative features of the bifurcation sequence are the same as those found with other radius ratios.