Dynamics of Wave Scintillation in Random Media

This paper concerns the asymptotic structure of the scintillation function in the simplified setting of wave propagation modeled by an Itô–Schrödinger equation. We show that the size of the scintillation function crucially depends on the smoothness of the initial conditions for the wave equation and on the size of the “array of detectors” where the wave fields are measured. In many practical settings, we show that the estimates are optimal and devise an equation for the appropriately rescaled scintillation function. The estimates are based on a careful analysis of Wigner transforms and of linear kinetic equations involving oscillatory integrals.