Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We establish global well-posedness and scattering for the cubic Dirac equation for small data in the critical space. The theory we develop is the Klein-Gordon counterpart of the Wave Maps / Schroedinger Maps theory. This is joint work with Sebastian Herr.

The subject of this talk is wave equations that arise from geometric considerations. Prime examples include the wave map equation and the Yang-Mills equation on the Minkowski space. On one hand, these are fundamental field theories arising in physics; on the other hand, they may be thought of as the hyperbolic analogues of the harmonic map and the elliptic Yang-Mills equations, which are interesting geometric PDEs on their own. I will discuss the recent progress on the problem of global regularity and asymptotic behavior of solutions to these PDEs.

PDEs (such as Navier-Stokes) are in principle infinite-dimensional dynamical systems. However, recent studies support conjecture that the turbulent solutions of spatially extended dissipative systems evolve within an `inertial' manifold spanned by a finite number of 'entangled' modes, dynamically isolated from the residual set of isolated, transient degrees of freedom. We provide numerical evidence that this finite-dimensional manifold on which the long-time dynamics of a chaotic dissipative dynamical system lives can be constructed solely from the knowledge of a set of unstable periodic orbits. In particular, we determine the dimension of the inertial manifold for Kuramoto-Sivashinsky system, and find it to be equal to the `'physical dimension' computed previously via the hyperbolicity properties of covariant Lyapunov vectors. (with Xiong Ding, H. Chate, E. Siminos and K. A. Takeuchi)

Stochastic optimal control problems governed by delay equations with delay in the control are usually more difficult to study than the ones when the delay appears only in the state. This is particularly true when we look at the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation. Indeed, even in the simplified setting (introduced first by Vinter and Kwong for the deterministic case) the HJB equation is an infinite dimensional second order semi-linear PDE that does not satisfy the so-called structure condition which substantially means that "the noise enters the system with the control". The absence of such condition, together with the lack of smoothing properties which is a common feature of problems with delay, prevents the use of known techniques (based on Backward Stochastic Differential Equations or on the smoothing properties of the linear part) to prove the existence of regular solutions to this HJB equation and thus no results in this direction have been proved till now. In this talk we will discuss results about existence of regular solutions of this kind of HJB equations and their use in solving the corresponding control problem by finding optimal feedback controls, also in the more difficult case of pointwise delay. This is a joint work with Federica Masiero.