Energy cascade and Burgers turbulence in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou chain

TL;DR

This paper derives a Burgers equation from the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou chain to analyze turbulence and spectral decay, revealing power-law behaviors and shock formation through analytical and numerical methods.

Contribution

It introduces a new Hamiltonian perturbation theory linking lattice dynamics to Burgers turbulence, providing analytical expressions for shock time and spectral exponents.

Findings

Power-law decay of spectrum with exponent -8/3 at shock time

Persistence of a -2 spectral exponent over extended time

Mode energy evolution follows a power-law in time and wavenumber

Abstract

The dynamics of initial long-wavelength excitations of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou chain has been the subject of intense investigations since the pioneering work of Fermi and collaborators. We have recently found a new regime where the spectrum of the Fourier modes decays with a power-law and we have interpreted this regime as a transient turbulence associated with the Burgers equation. In this paper we present the full derivation of the latter equation from the lattice dynamics using a newly developed infinite dimensional Hamiltonian perturbation theory. This theory allows us to relate the time evolution of the Fourier spectrum $E_k$ of the Burgers equation to the one of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou chain. As a consequence, we derive analytically both the shock time and the power-law $-8/3$ of the spectrum at this time. Using the shock time as a unit, we follow numerically the time-evolution of the spectrum and observe the persistence of the power $-2$ over an extensive time window. The exponent $-2$ has been widely discussed in the literature on the Burgers equation. The analysis of the Burgers equation in Fourier space also gives information on the time evolution of the energy of each single mode which, at short time, is also a power-law depending on the $k$-th wavenumber $E_k \sim t^{2k-2}$. This approach to the FPUT dynamics opens the way to a wider study of scaling regimes arising from more general initial conditions.