Wave-turbulence description of interacting particles: Klein-Gordon model with a Mexican-hat potential.

Abstract

In field theory, particles are waves or excitations that propagate on the fundamental state. In experiments or cosmological models, one typically wants to compute the out-of-equilibrium evolution of a given initial distribution of such waves. Wave turbulence deals with out-of-equilibrium ensembles of weakly nonlinear waves, and is therefore well suited to address this problem. As an example, we consider the complex Klein-Gordon equation with a Mexican-hat potential. This simple equation displays two kinds of excitations around the fundamental state: massive particles and massless Goldstone bosons. The former are waves with a nonzero frequency for vanishing wave number, whereas the latter obey an acoustic dispersion relation. Using wave-turbulence theory, we derive wave kinetic equations that govern the coupled evolution of the spectra of massive and massless waves. We first consider the thermodynamic solutions to these equations and study the wave condensation transition, which is the classical equivalent of Bose-Einstein condensation. We then focus on nonlocal interactions in wave-number space: we study the decay of an ensemble of massive particles into massless ones. Under rather general conditions, these massless particles accumulate at low wave number. We study the dynamics of waves coexisting with such a strong condensate, and we compute rigorously a nonlocal Kolmogorov-Zakharov solution, where particles are transferred nonlocally to the condensate, while energy cascades towards large wave numbers through local interactions. This nonlocal cascading state constitutes the intermediate asymptotics between the initial distribution of waves and the thermodynamic state reached in the long-time limit.