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)	Boundary layer analysis of some incompressible flows	Kim
October 24	Tau Shean Lim (UW Madison)	Traveling Fronts of Reaction-Diffusion Equations with Ignition Media and Levy Operators	Kim & Tran
October 31 (Special time and room: B313VV, 3PM-4PM)	Tarek Elgindi ( Princeton)	Propagation of Singularities in Incompressible Fluids	Lee & Kim
November 7	Adrian Tudorascu (West Virginia)	Hamilton-Jacobi equations in the Wasserstein space of probability measures	Feldman
November 14	Alexis Vasseur ( UT-Austin)	Compressible Navier-Stokes equations with degenerate viscosities	Feldman
November 21	Minh-Binh Tran (UW Madison )	Quantum Kinetic Problems	Hung Tran
November 28	David Kaspar (Brown)	Kinetics of shock clustering	Tran
December 5 (Special time and room: 3PM-4PM, B313VV)	Brian Weber (University of Pennsylvania)	Degenerate-Elliptic PDE and Toric Kahler 4-manfiolds	Bing Wang
December 12	(no seminar)

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.

Gung-Min Gie

Boundary layer analysis of some incompressible flows

The motions of viscous and inviscid fluids are modeled respectively by the Navier-Stokes and Euler equations. Considering the Navier-Stokes equations at vanishing viscosity as a singular perturbation of the Euler equations, one major problem, still essentially open, is to verify if the Navier-Stokes solutions converge as the viscosity tends to zero to the Euler solution in the presence of physical boundary. In this talk, we study the inviscid limit and boundary layers of some simplified Naiver-Stokes equations by either imposing a certain symmetry to the flow or linearizing the model around a stationary Euler flow. For the examples, we systematically use the method of correctors proposed earlier by J. L. Lions and construct an asymptotic expansion as the sum of the Navier-Stokes solution and the corrector. The corrector, which corrects the discrepancies between the boundary values of the viscous and inviscid solutions, is in fact an (approximating) solution of the corresponding Prandtl type equations. The validity of our asymptotic expansions is then confirmed globally in the whole domain by energy estimates on the difference of the viscous solution and the proposed expansion. This is a joint work with J. Kelliher, M. Lopes Filho, A. Mazzucato, and H. Nussenzveig Lopes.

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.

Tarek M. ELgindi

Propagation of Singularities in Incompressible Fluids

We will discuss some recent results on the local and global stability of certain singular solutions to the incompressible 2d Euler equation. We will begin by giving a brief overview of the classical and modern results on the 2d Euler equation--particularly related to well-posedness theory in critical spaces. Then we will present a new well-posedness class which allows for merely Lipschitz continuous velocity fields and non-decaying vorticity. This will be based upon some interesting estimates for singular integrals on spaces with L^\infty scaling. After that we will introduce a class of scale invariant solutions to the 2d Euler equation and describe some of their remarkable properties including the existence of pendulum-like quasi periodic solutions and infinite-time cusp formation in vortex patches with corners. This is a joint work with I. Jeong.

Adrian Tudorascu

Hamilton-Jacobi equations in the Wasserstein space of probability measures

In 2008 Gangbo, Nguyen and Tudorascu showed that certain variational solutions of the Euler-Poisson system in 1D can be regarded as optimal paths for the value-function giving the viscosity solution of some (infinite-dimensional) Hamilton-Jacobi equation whose phase-space is the Wasserstein space of Borel probability measures with finite second moment. At around the same time, Lasry, Lions, and others became interested in such Hamilton-Jacobi equations (HJE) in connection with their developing theory of Mean-Field games. A different approach (less intrinsic than ours) to the notion of viscosity solution was preferred, one that made an immediate connection between HJE in the Wasserstein space and HJE in Hilbert spaces (whose theory was well-studied and fairly well-understood). At the heart of the difference between these approaches lies the choice of the sub/supper-differential in the context of the Wasserstein space (i.e. the interpretation of ``cotangent space to this ``pseudo-Riemannian manifold) . In this talk I will start with a brief introduction to Mean-Field games and Optimal Transport, then I will discuss the challenges we encounter in the analysis of (our intrinsic) viscosity solutions of HJE in the Wasserstein space. Based on joint work with W. Gangbo.

Alexis Vasseur

Compressible Navier-Stokes equations with degenerate viscosities

We will discuss recent results on the construction of weak solutions for 3D compressible Navier-Stokes equations with degenerate viscosities. The method is based on the Bresch and Desjardins entropy. The main contribution is to derive MV type inequalities for the weak solutions, even if it is not verified by the first level of approximation. This provides existence of global solutions in time, for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations, in three dimensional space, with large initial data, possibly vanishing on the vacuum.

Minh-Binh Tran

Quantum kinetic problems

After the production of the first BECs, there has been an explosion of research on the kinetic theory associated to BECs. Later, Gardinier, Zoller and collaborators derived a Master Quantum Kinetic Equation for BECs and introduced the terminology ”Quantum Kinetic Theory”. In 2012, Reichl and collaborators made a breakthrough in discovering a new collision operator, which had been missing in the previous works. My talk is devoted to the description of our recent mathematical works on quantum kinetic theory. The talk will be based on my joint works with Alonso, Gamba (existence, uniqueness, propagation of moments), Nguyen (Maxwellian lower bound), Soffer (coupling Schrodinger–kinetic equations), Escobedo (convergence to equilibrium), Craciun (the analog between the global attractor conjecture in chemical reaction network and the convergence to equilibrium of quantum kinetic equations), Reichl (derivation).

David Kaspar

Kinetics of shock clustering

Suppose we solve a (deterministic) scalar conservation law with random initial data. Can we describe the probability law of the solution as a stochastic process in x for fixed later time t? The answer is yes, for certain Markov initial data, and the probability law factorizes as a product of kernels. These kernels are obtained by solving a mean-field kinetic equation which most closely resembles the Smoluchowski coagulation equation. We discuss prior and ongoing work concerning this and related problems.

Brian Weber

Degenerate-Elliptic PDE and Toric Kahler 4-manfiolds

Understanding scalar-flat instantons is crucial for knowing how Ka ̈hler manifolds degenerate. It is known that scalar-flat Kahler 4-manifolds with two symmetries give rise to a pair of linear degenerate-elliptic Heston type equations of the form x(fxx + fyy) + fx = 0, which were originally studied in mathematical finance. Vice- versa, solving these PDE produce scalar-flat Kahler 4-manifolds. These PDE have been studied locally, but here we describe new global results and their implications, partic- ularly a classification of scalar-flat metrics on K ̈ahler 4-manifolds and applications for the study of constant scalar curvature and extremal Ka ̈hler metrics.