Percolation transition in the kinematics of nonlinear resonance broadening in Charney-Hasegawa-Mima model of Rossby wave turbulence

TL;DR

This paper investigates how resonance broadening affects the structure of wave interactions in Rossby wave turbulence, revealing a percolation transition that likely signifies the onset of turbulence.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the quasi-resonant mode set has a complex structure with diverging area and identifies a percolation transition in the mode network linked to turbulence onset.

Findings

The set of quasi-resonant modes has a nontrivial structure with diverging area.

The mode network undergoes a percolation transition at a critical broadening level.

The transition correlates with the onset of turbulence in the system.

Abstract

We study the kinematics of nonlinear resonance broadening of interacting Rossby waves as modelled by the Charney-Hasegawa-Mima equation on a biperiodic domain. We focus on the set of wave modes which can interact quasi-resonantly at a particular level of resonance broadening and aim to characterise how the structure of this set changes as the level of resonance broadening is varied. The commonly held view that resonance broadening can be thought of as a thickening of the resonant manifold is misleading. We show that in fact the set of modes corresponding to a single quasi-resonant triad has a nontrivial structure and that its area in fact diverges for a finite degree of broadening. We also study the connectivity of the network of modes which is generated when quasi-resonant triads share common modes. This network has been argued to form the backbone for energy transfer in Rossby wave turbulence. We show that this network undergoes a percolation transition when the level of resonance broadening exceeds a critical value. Below this critical value, the largest connected component of the quasi-resonant network contains a negligible fraction of the total number of modes in the system whereas above this critical value a finite fraction of the total number of modes in the system are contained in the largest connected component. We argue that this percolation transition should correspond to the transition to turbulence in the system.