Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Considering SL(2,R) skew-product maps over circle rotations,
we prove that a renormalization transformation
associated with the golden mean alpha
has a nontrivial periodic orbit of length 3.
We also present some numerical results,
including evidence that this period 3 describes
scaling properties of the Hofstadter butterfly
near the top of the spectrum at alpha,
and scaling properties of the generalized eigenfunction
for this energy.

We consider the strong chain recurrent set and the generalized recurrent set for continuous maps of compact metric spaces.  Recent work by Fathi and Pageault has shown a connection between the two sets, and has led to new results on them.  We discuss a structure theorem for transitive/mixing maps, and classify maps that permit explosions in the size of the recurrent sets.

Breathers are periodic in time spatially localized solutions of evolutionary PDEs. They are known to exist for the sine-Gordon equation but are believed to be rare in other Klein-Gordon equations. Exchanging the roles of time and position, breathers can be interpreted as homoclinic solutions to a steady solution. In this talk, I will explain how to obtain an asymptotic formula for the distance between the stable and unstable manifold of the steady solution when the steady solution has weakly hyperbolic one dimensional stable and unstable manifolds. Their distance is exponentially small with respect to the amplitude of the breather and therefore classical perturbative techniques cannot be applied. This is a joint work with O. Gomide, T. Seara and C. Zeng.

We consider the problem of computing unstable manifolds for equilibrium solutions of parabolic PDEs posed on irregular spatial domains. This new approach is based on the parameterization method, a general functional analytic framework for studying invariant manifolds of dynamical systems. The method leads to an infinitesimal invariance equation describing the unstable manifold. A recursive scheme leads to linear homological equations for the jets of the manifold which are solved using the finite element method. One feature of the method is that we recover the dynamics on the manifold in addition to its embedding.  We implement the method for some example problems with polynomial and non-polynomial nonlinearities posed on various non-convex two dimensional domains. We provide numerical support for the accuracy of the computed manifolds using the natural notion of a-posteriori error admitted by the parameterization method. This is joint work with J.D. Mireles-James and Necibe Tuncer.