Transition from weak turbulence to collapse turbulence regimes in the Majda-McLaughlin-Tabak model

Abstract

It is well known that wave collapses can emerge from the focusing one-dimensional (1D) Majda-McLaughlin-Tabak (MMT) model as a result of modulational instability. However, how these wave collapses affect the spectral properties and statistics of the wave field has not been adequately studied. We undertake this task by simulating the forced-dissipated 1D MMT model over a range of forcing amplitudes. Our results show that when the forcing is weak, the spectrum agrees well with the prediction by wave turbulence theory with few collapses in the field. As the forcing strength increases, we see an increase in the occurrence of collapses, together with a transition from a power-law spectrum to an exponentially decaying spectrum. Through a spectral decomposition, we find that the exponential spectrum is dominated by the wave collapse component in the nonintegrable MMT model, which is in analogy to a soliton gas in integrable turbulence.