Soliton turbulence in one-dimensional cellular automata (Q805023)

[In the paper, page 321 is misplaced and should be placed between pages 324 and 325.] The dynamics of spatially extended objects and fields has been recently studied in many branches of physical sciences and it has become clear that nonlinear instability in spatial coupling often induces unpredictable phenomena [\textit{Y. Kuramoto}, Chemical oscillations, waves, and turbulence (1984; Zbl 0558.76051)]. Striking examples are the self- organization of turbulence and the statistical order in space and time. Although fundamental features of turbulence have been understood in terms of chaotic dynamics [\textit{A. J. Lichtenberg} and \textit{M. A. Lieberman}, Regular and stochastic motion (1983; Zbl 0506.70016)], e.g. strange attractors, nonperiodic motions, etc., it seems that the concept of turbulence must be recast in a much wider framework than the dynamical theory of lumped systems allows. One of the main steps in this direction should be to consider the essential role of spatial degrees of freedom. In the present paper, the authors describe some new generic features of turbulence induced by spatial interactions. In order to capture these features, statistical properties of one-dimensional cellular automata (CA) which support simple solitary waves are numerically studied. As the authors underline, when a globally unstable process is supported in a CA, the discrete structure of CA systems will induce novel features, not present in continuous systems. In the paper under review it is shown that the spatio-temporal patterns generated by the CA system are sensitively dependent on the collision processes of solitons, and other elementary excitations such as breathers, kinks, and nuclei. Patterns typically become randomized as collisions proceed. Turbulent states are realized after many collisions and the resulting global patterns can be classified by the types of elementary excitations they contain. In many turbulent states, the spectra reveal a long-range order with a \(k^{-\nu}\) anomaly for \(k<<1\). The irreversible process leading to turbulent equilibrium is characterized by the transient spectrum together with the Allan variance and the mean free motion of a soliton in the turbulent states is measured by the mutual information flow, while the information loss is shown to obey an inverse power law. The transient time to reach an attractor grows exponentially with the size of the system, which suggests that in the thermodynamic limit soliton turbulence is not an attractor but rather a transient state. Finally, the authors point out that the global chaos observed in the CA systems considered is sustained by a balance between creation and annihilation of localized turbulence. They also compare turbulence in CA with global chaos in partial differential equations.