Scaling regimes of the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation from the functional renormalization group

Abstract

We revisit the renormalization group (RG) approach to the one-dimensional stochastic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky (KS) equation and show that previous approaches based on perturbative Wilsonian RG with a sharp cutoff are not valid, even though they yield a qualitatively correct picture. The reason is that taking momentum derivatives while using the sharp cutoff is not well-defined in some cases and leads to intrinsic divergencies. This is a well-known problem of Wilsonian RG, which can be simply cured by using a smooth cutoff, and employing the functional renormalization group (FRG) framework. We establish the flow equations for the KS model within the FRG, and demonstrate that it flows to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) fixed point at large scales. We then calculate the full two-point correlation function over a wide range of momenta and frequencies. We show that it exhibits three universal scaling regimes that we characterize: the KPZ regime (with dynamical exponent $z=3/2$), the Edwards-Wilkinson regime (with $z=2$) and the recently discovered inviscid regime (with $z=1$). The latter develops over an extended range of large wavenumbers and originates from the vanishing of the effective viscosity. Lastly, we investigate the large-scale behavior of the deterministic KS equation by studying the limit of vanishing noise and we determine the scales where the KPZ regime can emerge in the deterministic case.