Energy cascade and Burgers turbulence in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou chain

The dynamics of initial long-wavelength excitations of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou chain has been the subject of intense investigations since the pioneering work of Fermi and collaborators. We have recently found a regime where the spectrum of the Fourier modes decays with a power law and we have interpreted this regime as a transient turbulence associated with the Burgers equation. In this paper we present the full derivation of the latter equation from the lattice dynamics using an infinite-dimensional Hamiltonian perturbation theory. This theory allows us to relate the time evolution of the Fourier spectrum E_k of the Burgers equation to that of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou (FPUT) chain. As a consequence, we derive analytically both the shock time and the power law −8/3 of the spectrum at this time. Using the shock time as a unit, we follow numerically the time evolution of the spectrum and observe the persistence of the power −2 over an extensive time window. The exponent −2 has been widely discussed in the literature on the Burgers equation. The analysis of the Burgers equation in Fourier space also gives information on the time evolution of the energy of each single mode which, at short time, is also a power law depending on the kth wavenumber E_k ~ t^{2k−2}. This approach to the FPUT dynamics opens the way to a wider study of scaling regimes arising from more general initial conditions.