On the use of tricoherent analysis to detect non-linear wave-wave interactions

Abstract

For the description of non-linear effects in dispersive media, the approach of three- and four-wave interactions may be used. Higher-order spectral analysis is required for identifying interacting waves in random signals. The bicoherence spectrum, which is the normalized cumulant spectrum of the third order, has been applied to numerous studies for analysing three-wave interactions in numerical, laboratory and natural experiments. Here, we develop the Incoherence spectrum to detect four-wave interactions, calculate statistical properties of the trispectrum and tricoherence estimators as well as the confidence interval for the latter, and present results of numerical estimations of the tricoherence using synthetic signals.