Paper detail

Weakly nonlinear Schrödinger equation with random initial data

It is common practice to approximate a weakly nonlinear wave equation through a kinetic transport equation, thus raising the issue of controlling the validity of the kinetic limit for a suitable choice of the random initial data. While for the general case a proof of the kinetic limit remains open, we report on first progress. As wave equation we consider the nonlinear Schrodinger equation discretized on a hypercubic lattice. Since this is a Hamiltonian system, a natural choice of random initial data is distributing them according to the corresponding Gibbs measure with a chemical potential chosen so that the Gibbs field has exponential mixing. The solution psi_t(x) of the nonlinear Schrodinger equation yields then a stochastic process stationary in x in Z^d and t in R. If lambda denotes the strength of the nonlinearity, we prove that the space-time covariance of psi_t(x) has a limit as lambda -> 0 for t=lambda^(-2)*tau, with tau fixed and |tau| sufficiently small. The limit agrees with the prediction from kinetic theory.