Wave turbulence and the kinetic equation beyond leading order

TL;DR

This paper develops a perturbative scheme to solve the Liouville equation for weakly nonlinear classical field theories, deriving the kinetic equation beyond leading order to better understand wave turbulence.

Contribution

It introduces a novel diagrammatic method analogous to quantum scattering theory to derive the kinetic equation at next-to-leading order in weak nonlinearity.

Findings

Derived the kinetic equation to next-to-leading order

Provided an efficient scheme for analyzing wave turbulence

Extended understanding of non-equilibrium states in classical fields

Abstract

We derive a scheme by which to solve the Liouville equation perturbatively in the nonlinearity, which we apply to weakly nonlinear classical field theories. Our solution is a variant of the Prigogine diagrammatic method, and is based on an analogy between the Liouville equation in infinite volume and scattering in quantum mechanics, described by the Lippmann-Schwinger equation. The motivation for our work is wave turbulence: a broad class of nonlinear classical field theories are believed to have a stationary turbulent state -- a far-from-equilibrium state, even at weak coupling. Our method provides an efficient way to derive properties of the weak wave turbulent state. A central object in these studies, which is a reduction of the Liouville equation, is the kinetic equation, which governs the occupation numbers of the modes. All properties of wave turbulence to date are based on the kinetic equation found at leading order in the weak nonlinearity. We explicitly obtain the kinetic equation to next-to-leading order.