Uniqueness of Solutions to the Spectral Hierarchy in Kinetic Wave Turbulence Theory

TL;DR

This paper proves the uniqueness and well-posedness of solutions to the spectral hierarchy in 4-wave kinetic wave turbulence, confirming that factorized initial data lead to unique factorized solutions, advancing the mathematical foundation of wave turbulence theory.

Contribution

It establishes the first proof of well-posedness and uniqueness for the spectral hierarchy in 4-wave interactions, linking it to the wave kinetic equation.

Findings

Spectral hierarchy solutions are unique in an appropriate function space.

Factorized initial data lead to factorized solutions.

The spectral hierarchy is well-posed for 4-wave interactions.

Abstract

In arXiv:1201.4067 and arXiv:1611.08030, Eyink and Shi and Chibbaro et al., respectively, formally derived an infinite, coupled hierarchy of equations for the spectral correlation functions of a system of weakly interacting nonlinear dispersive waves with random phases in the standard kinetic limit. Analogously to the relationship between the Boltzmann hierarchy and Boltzmann equation, this spectral hierarchy admits a special class of factorized solutions, where each factor is a solution to the wave kinetic equation (WKE). A question left open by these works and highly relevant for the mathematical derivation of the WKE is whether solutions of the spectral hierarchy are unique, in particular whether factorized initial data necessarily lead to factorized solutions. In this article, we affirmatively answer this question in the case of 4-wave interactions by showing, for the first time, that this spectral hierarchy is well-posed in an appropriate function space. Our proof draws on work of Chen and Pavlovi\'{c} for the Gross-Pitaevskii hierarchy in quantum many-body theory and of Germain et al. for the well-posedness of the WKE.