On the Properties of Energy Flux in Wave Turbulence

Abstract

We study the properties of energy flux in wave turbulence via the Majda-McLaughlin-Tabak (MMT) equation with a quadratic dispersion relation. One of our purposes is to resolve the inter-scale energy flux $P$ in the stationary state to elucidate its distribution and scaling with spectral level. More importantly, we perform a quartet-level decomposition of $P=\sum_\Omega P_\Omega$, with each component $P_\Omega$ representing the contribution from quartet interactions with frequency mismatch $\Omega$, in order to explain the properties of $P$ as well as study the wave-turbulence closure model. Our results show that time series of $P$ closely follows a Gaussian distribution, with its standard deviation several times its mean value $\overline{P}$. This large standard deviation is shown to mainly result from the fluctuation (in time) of the quasi-resonances, i.e., $P_{\Omega\neq 0}$. The scaling of spectral level with $\overline{P}$ exhibits $\overline{P}^{1/3}$ and $\overline{P}^{1/2}$ at high and low nonlinearity, consistent with the kinetic and dynamic scalings respectively. The different scaling laws in the two regimes are explained through the dominance of quasi-resonances ($P_{\Omega\neq 0}$) and exact resonances ($P_{\Omega= 0}$) in the former and latter regimes. Finally, we investigate the wave-turbulence closure model, which connects fourth-order correlators to products of pair correlators through a broadening function $f(\Omega)$, sometimes argued to be a $sinc$ function in the theory. Our numerical data show that consistent behavior of $f(\Omega)$ can only be observed upon averaging over a large number of quartets, but with $f(\Omega)$ showing $f\sim 1/\Omega^\beta$ dependence with $\beta$ taking values between $1.3$ and $1.6$.