Solitons, chaos, and energy transfer in the Zakharov equations

Abstract

In the present paper we investigate the process of energy transfer in the Zakharov equations. Energy is initially injected into modes with small wave vectors. When the modulational instability threshold is exceeded, some additional modes with small wave vectors are excited and solitons are formed if one lies in a quasi-integrable regime and if the number of excited modes is large enough. These solitons are formed as a direct result of the modulational instability and in fact saturate the instability. However, use of a low-dimensional formalism based on collective variables shows that if the largest length scale of the linearly excited modes is much longer than the most unstable, these solitons may be greatly influenced as they interact with ion-acoustic waves. In those cases, full simulation of the space-time problem indicates that energy is progressively transferred to modes with very small length scales. Since we work with one spatial dimension, collapse is absent and energy transfer is due to the stochastic dynamics.