Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The interactions between particles and fluid have received a bulk of attention due to a number of their applications in the field of, for example, biotechnology, medicine, and in the study of sedimentation phenomenon, compressibility of droplets of the spray, cooling tower plumes, and diesel engines, etc. In this talk, we present coupled hydrodynamic equations which can formally be derived from Vlasov-Boltzmann/Navier-Stokes equations. More precisely, our proposed equations consist of the compressible pressureless Euler equations and the isentropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations. For the coupled system, we establish the global existence of classical solutions when the domain is periodic, and its large-time behavior which shows the exponential alignment between two fluid velocities. We also remark on blow-up of classical solutions in the whole space.

In this talk, we consider the initial-boundary value problem for the Fokker-Planck equation in an interval or in a bounded domain with absorbing boundary conditions. We discuss a theory of well-posedness of classical solutions for the problem as well as the exponential decay in time, hypoellipticity away from the singular set, and the Holder continuity of the solutions up to the singular set. This is a joint work with J. Jang,J. Jung, and J. Velazquez.

The study of reflector surfaces in geometric optics necessitates the analysis of nonlinear equations of Monge-Ampere type. For many important examples (including the near field reflector problem), the equation no longer falls within the scope of optimal transport, but within the class of "Generated Jacobian equations" (GJEs). This class of equations was recently introduced by Trudinger, motivated by problems in geometric optics, however they appear in many others areas (e.g. variations of the Minkowski problem in convex geometry). Under natural assumptions, we prove Holder regularity for the gradient of weak solutions. The results are new in particular for the near-field point source reflector problem, but are applicable for a broad class of GJEs: those satisfying an analogue of the A3-weak condition introduced by Ma, Trudinger and Wang in optimal transport. Joint work with Jun Kitagawa.

Consider a general linear Hamiltonian system u_t = JLu in a Hilbert space X, called the energy space. We assume that R(L) is closed, L induces a bounded and symmetric bi-linear form on X, and the energy functional has only finitely many negative dimensions n(L). There is no restriction on the anti-selfadjoint operator J except \ker L \subset D(J), which can be unbounded and with an infinite dimensional kernel space. Our first result is an index theorem on the linear instability of the evolution group e^{tJL}. More specifically, we obtain some relationship between n(L) and the dimensions of generalized eigenspaces of eigenvalues of JL, some of which may be embedded in the continuous spectrum. Our second result is the linear exponential trichotomy of the evolution group e^{tJL}. In particular, we prove the nonexistence of exponential growth in the finite co-dimensional center subspace and the optimal bounds on the algebraic growth rate there. This is applied to construct the local invariant manifolds for nonlinear Hamiltonian PDEs near the orbit of a coherent state (standing wave, steady state, traveling waves etc.). For some cases (particularly ground states), we can prove orbital stability and local uniqueness of center manifolds. We will discuss applications to examples including dispersive long wave models such as BBM and KDV equations, Gross-Pitaevskii equation for superfluids, 2D Euler equation for ideal fluids, and 3D Vlasov-Maxwell systems for collisionless plasmas. This work will be discussed in two talks. In the first talk, we will motivate the problem by several Hamiltonian PDEs, describe the main results, and demonstrate how they are applied. In the second talk, some ideas of the proof will be given.