## Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Friday, November 20, 2015 - 15:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , Yingfei Yi , University of Alberta & Georgia Tech , Organizer: Rafael de la Llave
The talk concerns limit behaviors of stationary measures of diffusion processes generated from white-noise perturbed systems of ordinary differential equations. By relaxing the notion of Lyapunov functions associated with the stationary Fokker-Planck equations, new existence and non-existence results of stationary measures will be presented. As noises vanish, concentration and limit behaviors of stationary measures will be described with particular attentions paying to the special role played by multiplicative noises. Connections to problems such as stochastic stability, stochastic bifurcations, and thermodynamics limits will also be discussed.
Monday, November 16, 2015 - 11:00 , Location: Skiles 005 , James Tanis , College de France , Organizer: Rafael de la Llave
We prove results concerning the equidistribution of some "sparse" subsets of orbits of horocycle flows on $SL(2, R)$ mod lattice. As a consequence of our analysis, we recover the best known rate of growth of Fourier coefficients of cusp forms for arbitrary noncompact lattices of $SL(2, R)$, up to a logarithmic factor.  This talk addresses joint work with Livio Flaminio, Giovanni Forni and Pankaj Vishe.
Friday, November 6, 2015 - 11:00 , Location: Skiles 005 , , Princeton University , , Organizer: Michael Damron
We will consider (sub)shifts with complexity such that the difference from n to n+1 is constant for all large n. The shifts that arise naturally from interval exchange transformations belong to this class. An interval exchange transformation on d intervals has at most d/2 ergodic probability measures. We look to establish the correct bound for shifts with constant complexity growth. To this end, we give our current bound and discuss further improvements when more assumptions are allowed. This is ongoing work with Michael Damron.
Monday, November 2, 2015 - 11:00 , Location: Skiles 005 , Siddharth Maddali , Carnegie Mellon , Organizer: Rafael de la Llave
I present a formalism and an computational scheme to quantify the dynamics of grain boundary migration in polycrystalline materials, applicable to three-dimensional  microstructure data obtained from non-destructive coarsening experiments. I will describe a geometric technique of interface tracking using well-established optimization algorithms and demonstrate how, when coupled with very basic physical assumptions, one can effectively measure grain boundary energy density and mobility of a given misorientation type in the two-parameter subspace of boundary inclinations. By doing away with any specific model or parameterization for the energetics, I seek to have my analysis applicable to general anisotropies in energy and mobility. I present results in two proof-of-concept test cases, one first described in closed form by J. von Neumann more than half a century ago, and the other which assumes analytic but anisotropic energy and mobility known in advance.
Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - 11:00 , Location: Skiles 05 , Blaz Mramor , Univ. Freiburg , Organizer: Rafael de la Llave
The Allen-Cahn equation is a second order semilinear elliptic PDE that arises in mathematical models describing phase transitions between two constant states. The variational structure of this equation allows us to study energy-minimal phase transitions, which correspond to uniformly bounded non-constant globally minimal solutions. The set of such solutions depends heavily on the geometry of the underlying space. In this talk we shall focus on the case where the underlying space is a Cayley graph of a group with the word metric. More precisely, we assume that the group is hyperbolic and show that there exists a minimal solution with any “nice enough” asymptotic behaviour prescribed by the two constant states. The set in the Cayley graph where the phase transition for such a solution takes place corresponds to a solution of an asymptotic Plateau problem.
Monday, September 28, 2015 - 11:00 , Location: Skiles 005 , Chenchen Mou , Georgia Institute of Technology , Organizer:
In this talk, we will consider semiconcavity of viscosity solutions for a class of degenerate elliptic integro-differential equations in R^n. This class of equations includes Bellman equations containing operators of Levy-Ito type. Holder and Lipschitz continuity of viscosity solutions for a more general class of degenerate elliptic integro-differential equations are also provided.
Monday, September 21, 2015 - 11:00 , Location: Skiles 005 , Marian Gidea , Yeshiva University , Organizer: Rafael de la Llave
We prove the existence of diffusion orbits drifting along heteroclinic chains of normally hyperbolic 3-dimensional cylinders, under suitable assumptions on the dynamics on the cylinders and on their homoclinic/heteroclinic connections. These assumptions are satisfied in the a priori stable case of the Arnold diffusion problem. We provide  a geometric argument that extends Birkhoff's procedure for constructing connecting orbits  inside a zone of instability for a twist map on the annuls. This is joint work with J.-P. Marco.
Monday, September 14, 2015 - 11:00 , Location: Skiles 005 , Willam T. Gignac , Georgia Tech (Math) , Organizer: Rafael de la Llave
Let f be a rational self-map of the complex projective plane. A central problem when analyzing the dynamics of f is to understand the sequence of degrees deg(f^n) of the iterates of f. Knowing the growth rate and structure of this sequence in many cases enables one to construct invariant currents/measures for dynamical system as well as bound its topological entropy. Unfortunately, the structure of this sequence remains mysterious for general rational maps. Over the last ten years, however, an approach to the problem through studying dynamics on spaces of valuations has proved fruitful. In this talk, I aim to discuss the link between dynamics on valuation spaces and problems of degree/order growth in complex dynamics, and discuss some of the positive results that have come from its exploration.
Friday, September 11, 2015 - 15:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , Yannick Sire , John Hopkins University , Organizer: Rafael de la Llave
I will describe several recent results with N. Nadirashvili where we construct extremal metrics for eigenvalues on riemannian surfaces. This involves the study of a Schrodinger operator. As an application, one gets isoperimetric inequalities on the 2-sphere for the third eigenvalue of the Laplace Beltrami operator.
Wednesday, September 9, 2015 - 11:00 , Location: Skiles 006 , Xiaolong He , Georgia Tech (Math)/Hunan University , Organizer: Rafael de la Llave
We investigate the existence of quasi-periodic solutions for state-dependent delay differential equationsusing the parameterization method, which is different from the usual way-working on the solution manifold.  Under the assumption of finite-time differentiability of functions and exponential dichotomy, the existence and smoothness of quasi-periodic solutions are investigated by using contraction arguments We also develop a  KAM theory  to seek analytic quasi-periodic solutions. In contrast with the finite differentonable theory, this requires adjusting parameters. We prove that the set of parameters which guarantee the existence of analytic quasi-periodic solutions is of positive measure. All of these results are given in an a-posterior form. Namely, given a approximate solution satisfying some non-degeneracy conditions, there is a true solution nearby.