PDE Geometric Analysis seminar

The seminar will be held in room 901 of Van Vleck Hall on Mondays from 3:30pm - 4:30pm, unless indicated otherwise.

PDE GA Seminar Schedule Fall 2016

date	speaker	title	host(s)
September 12	Daniel Spirn (U of Minnesota)	Dipole Trajectories in Bose-Einstein Condensates	Kim
September 19	Donghyun Lee (UW-Madison)	The Boltzmann equation with specular boundary condition in convex domains	Feldman
September 26	Kevin Zumbrun (Indiana)	A Stable Manifold Theorem for a class of degenerate evolution equations	Kim
October 3	Will Feldman (UChicago )	Liquid Drops on a Rough Surface	Lin & Tran
October 10	Ryan Hynd (UPenn)	Extremal functions for Morrey’s inequality in convex domains	Feldman
October 17	Gung-Min Gie (Louisville)		Kim
October 24	Tau Shean Lim (UW Madison)	Traveling Fronts of Reaction-Diffusion Equations with Ignition Media and Levy Operators	Kim & Tran
October 31	Tarek Elgindi ( Princeton)	Propagation of Singularities in Incompressible Fluids	Lee & Kim
November 7	Adrian Tudorascu (West Virginia)		Feldman
November 14	Alexis Vasseur ( UT-Austin)		Feldman
November 21	Minh-Binh Tran (UW Madison )	Quantum Kinetic Problems	Hung Tran
November 28	( )
December 5	Brian Weber (University of Pennsylvania)	TBA	Bing Wang
December 12	David Kaspar (Brown)		Tran

Abstracts

Daniel Spirn

Dipole Trajectories in Bose-Einstein Condensates

Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) are a state of matter in which supercooled atoms condense into the lowest possible quantum state. One interesting important feature of BECs are the presence of vortices that form when the condensate is stirred with lasers. I will discuss the behavior of these vortices, which interact with both the confinement potential and other vortices. I will also discuss a related inverse problem in which the features of the confinement can be extracted by the propagation of vortex dipoles.

Donghyun Lee

The Boltzmann equation with specular reflection boundary condition in convex domains

I will present a recent work (https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.04342) with Chanwoo Kim on the global-wellposedness and stability of the Boltzmann equation in general smooth convex domains.

Kevin Zumbrun

TITLE: A Stable Manifold Theorem for a class of degenerate evolution equations

ABSTRACT: We establish a Stable Manifold Theorem, with consequent exponential decay to equilibrium, for a class

of degenerate evolution equations $Au'+u=D(u,u)$ with A bounded, self-adjoint, and one-to-one, but not invertible, and

$D$ a bounded, symmetric bilinear map. This is related to a number of other scenarios investigated recently for which the

associated linearized ODE $Au'+u=0$ is ill-posed with respect to the Cauchy problem. The particular case studied here

pertains to the steady Boltzmann equation, yielding exponential decay of large-amplitude shock and boundary layers.

Will Feldman

Liquid Drops on a Rough Surface

I will discuss the problem of determining the minimal energy shape of a liquid droplet resting on a rough solid surface. The shape of a liquid drop on a solid is strongly affected by the micro-structure of the surface on which it rests, where the surface inhomogeneity arises through varying chemical composition and surface roughness. I will explain a macroscopic regularity theory for the free boundary which allows to study homogenization, and more delicate properties like the size of the boundary layer induced by the surface roughness.

The talk is based on joint work with Inwon Kim. A remark for those attending the weekend conference: this talk will attempt to have as little as possible overlap with I. Kim's conference talks.

Ryan Hynd

Extremal functions for Morrey’s inequality in convex domains

A celebrated result in the theory of Sobolev spaces is Morrey's inequality, which establishes the continuous embedding of the continuous functions in certain Sobolev spaces. Interestingly enough the equality case of this inequality has not been thoroughly investigated (unless the underlying domain is R^n). We show that if the underlying domain is a bounded convex domain, then the extremal functions are determined up to a multiplicative factor. We will explain why the assertion is false if convexity is dropped and why convexity is not necessary for this result to hold.

Tau Shean Lim

Traveling Fronts of Reaction-Diffusion Equations with Ignition Media and Levy Operators

We discuss traveling front solutions u(t,x) = U(x-ct) of reaction-diffusion equations u_t = Lu + f(u) with ignition media f and diffusion operators L generated by symmetric Levy processes X_t. Existence and uniqueness of fronts are well-known in the case of classical diffusion (i.e., Lu = Laplacian(u)) and non-local diffusion (Lu = J*u - u). Our work extends these results to general Levy operators. In particular, we show that a strong diffusivity in the underlying process (in the sense that the first moment of X_1 is infinite) prevents formation of fronts, while a weak diffusivity gives rise to a unique (up to translation) front U and speed c>0.