Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

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.