The nonlinear decay of complex signals in dissipative media.

Abstract

The solution of Burgers' equation with random initial conditions is often said to describe "Burgers turbulence." The Burgers equation describes two fundamental effects characteristic of any turbulence-the nonlinear transfer of energy over the spectrum and the dissipation of energy in the small-scale components. Strong interaction between coherent harmonics, associated with the nondispersive nature of the dynamics, leads to the appearance of local self-similar structure. In Burgers' equation, continuous random initial fields are transformed into sequences of regions with regular behavior, with random locations of the shocks separating them. Moreover, the statistical properties of such random fields are also self-similar. It is already known that the merging of the shocks leads to an increase of the external scale of the turbulence, and because of this the energy of a random signal ("noise") decreases more slowly than the energy of simple signals. Here we show that similar behavior takes place for complex regular signals with fractal structure in the coordinate or in the wave-number space. In all these cases, the law of increase of the external scale is determined by the behavior of the structure function of the integral of the initial field-i.e., the structure function of the initial action. (c) 1995 American Institute of Physics.