Thermalization of the dispersive three-wave interaction

We investigate the role of dispersion effects on the long-term evolution of the nonlinear three-wave interaction. We show that the three waves exhibit, as a general rule, an irreversible evolution towards a thermodynamic equilibrium state in which they propagate with identical velocities. As a result of this thermalization process, the three-wave system is driven away from spatio-temporal resonance, so that the equilibrium state does not satisfy the (phase-matching) resonant conditions of energy and momentum conservation for the averaged frequencies. Moreover, we show that the interplay between temporal dispersion and spatial diffraction leads to the emergence of a peculiar equilibrium state characterized by an X-shaped spatio-temporal spectrum. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2007.