The effect of dressing on thermalization of interacting waves

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generalized framework for prethermalization in interacting wave systems, showing it occurs across interaction regimes and is governed by the Zakharov equation, supported by numerical evidence.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach dividing wave interactions into trivial and nontrivial, extending prethermalization understanding to strong interactions.

Findings

Prethermalization occurs in both weak and strong interaction regimes.

Dressing waves with trivial interactions simplifies the system's statistical behavior.

Numerical experiments confirm the theoretical predictions.

Abstract

We propose a more general setup for prethermalization in the system of interacting waves. The idea lies in dividing the multi-wave interactions into trivial and nontrivial ones. The trivial interactions will dress waves and lead to a less strongly interacting system which is statistically equivalent to the original one. With this in mind, we find that prethermalization occurs not only in the weakly interacting regime but also in the strongly interacting regime. The irreversible process towards equilibrium is governed by the Zakharov equation, from which double scaling of the thermalization time is expected. Finally, the theory is well confirmed in numerical experiments.