Dynamical large deviations for an inhomogeneous wave kinetic theory: linear wave scattering by a random medium

Abstract

The wave kinetic equation predicts the averaged temporal evolution of a continuous spectral density of waves either randomly interacting or scattered by the fine structure of a medium. In a wide range of systems, the wave kinetic equation is derived from a fundamental equation of wave motion, which is symmetric through time-reversal. By contrast, the corresponding wave kinetic equation is time-irreversible. A similar paradox appears whenever one makes a mesoscopic description of the evolution of a very large number of microscopic degrees of freedom. Recently, it has been understood that the kinetic description itself, at a mesoscopic level, should not break time-reversal symmetry. The proper theoretical or mathematical tool to derive a mesoscopic time-reversal stochastic process is large deviation theory, for which the deterministic wave kinetic equation appears as the most probable evolution. This paper follows Bouchet (2020) and a series of other works that derive the large deviation Hamiltonians of the classical kinetic theories. We propose a derivation of the large deviation principle for the linear scattering of waves by a weak random potential in an inhomogeneous situation. This problem involves microscopic scales corresponding to the typical wavelengths and periods of the waves and mesoscopic ones which are the scales of spatial inhomogeneities in the spectral density and the time needed for the random scatterers to alter the wave spectrum. The main assumption of the kinetic regime is a large separation of these microscopic and mesoscopic scales. We choose a generic model of wave scattering by weak disorder: the Schr\"odinger equation with a random potential. We derive the path large deviation principle for the local spectral density and discuss its main properties. We show that the mesoscopic process obeys a time-reversal symmetry at the level of large deviations. (abridged)