One-dimensional wave kinetic theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates the wave kinetic theory for the one-dimensional MMT model, revealing the limitations of collision kernels for certain dispersion relations and establishing the timescales where nontrivial wave turbulence dynamics can occur.

Contribution

It analyzes the kinetic limit of the 1D MMT model with various scaling laws, showing the triviality of collision kernels for certain parameters and identifying the timescales for nontrivial wave turbulence.

Findings

Collision kernel is trivial for 1 < σ ≤ 2.

No nontrivial second moment dynamics up to kinetic timescales.

Wave kinetic equation derived for large L and small α under specific scalings.

Abstract

Although wave kinetic equations have been rigorously derived in dimension $d \geq 2$, both the physical and mathematical theory of wave turbulence in dimension $d = 1$ is less understood. Here, we look at the one-dimensional MMT (Majda, McLaughlin, and Tabak) model on a large interval of length $L$ with nonlinearity of size $\alpha$, restricting to the case where there are no derivatives in the nonlinearity. The dispersion relation here is $|k|^\sigma$ for $0 < \sigma \leq 2$ and $\sigma \neq 1$, and when $\sigma = 2$, the MMT model specializes to the cubic nonlinear Schr\"odinger (NLS) equation. In the range of $1 < \sigma \leq 2$, the proposed collision kernel in the kinetic equation is trivial, begging the question of what is the appropriate kinetic theory in that setting. In this paper we study the kinetic limit $L \to \infty$ and $\alpha \to 0$ under various scaling laws $\alpha \sim L^{-\gamma}$ and exhibit the wave kinetic equation up to timescales $T \sim L^{-\epsilon}\alpha^{-\frac{5}{4}}$ (or $T \sim L^{-\epsilon} T_{\mathrm{kin}}^{\frac{5}{8}}$). In the case of a trivial collision kernel, our result implies there can be no nontrivial dynamics of the second moment up to timescales $T_{\mathrm{kin}}$.