Wave turbulence

In continuum mechanics, wave turbulence is a set of nonlinear waves deviated far from thermal equilibrium. Such a state is usually accompanied by dissipation. It is either decaying turbulence or requires an external source of energy to sustain it. Examples are waves on a fluid surface excited by winds or ships, and waves in plasma excited by electromagnetic waves etc.

External sources by some resonant mechanism usually excite waves with frequencies and wavelengths in some narrow interval. For example, shaking container with the frequency ω excites surface waves with the frequency ω/2 (parametric resonance, discovered by Michael Faraday). When wave amplitudes are small – which usually means that the wave is far from breaking – only those waves exist that are directly excited by an external source.

When, however, wave amplitudes are not very small (for surface waves: when the fluid surface is inclined by more than few degrees) waves with different frequencies start to interact. That leads to an excitation of waves with frequencies and wavelengths in wide intervals, not necessarily in resonance with an external source. It can be observed in the experiments with a high amplitude of shaking that initially the waves appear which are in resonance. Thereafter both longer and shorter waves appear as a result of wave interaction. The appearance of shorter waves is referred to as a direct cascade while longer waves are part of an inverse cascade of wave turbulence.

Two generic types of wave turbulence should be distinguished: statistical wave turbulence (SWT) and discrete wave turbulence (DWT).

In SWT theory exact and quasi-resonances are omitted, which allows using some statistical assumptions and describing the wave system by kinetic equations and their stationary solutions – the approach developed by Vladimir E. Zakharov. These solutions are called Kolmogorov–Zakharov (KZ) energy spectra and have the form k^−α, with k the wavenumber and α a positive constant depending on the specific wave system. The form of KZ-spectra does not depend on the details of initial energy distribution over the wave field or on the initial magnitude of the complete energy in a wave turbulent system. Only the fact the energy is conserved at some inertial interval is important.

...
Wikipedia