Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Dynamical systems have proven to be a useful tool for the design of space missions. For instance, the use of invariant manifolds is now common to design transfer strategies. Solar Sailing is a proposed form of spacecraft propulsion, where large membrane mirrors take advantage of the solar radiation pressure to push the spacecraft. Although the acceleration produced by the radiation pressure is smaller than the one achieved by a traditional spacecraft it is continuous and unlimited. This makes some long term missions more accessible, and opens a wide new range of possible applications that cannot be achieved by a traditional spacecraft. In this presentation we will focus on the dynamics of a Solar sail in a couple of situations. We will introduce this problem focusing on a Solar sail in the Earth-Sun system. In this case, the model used will be the Restricted Three Body Problem (RTBP) plus Solar radiation pressure. The effect of the solar radiation pressure on the RTBP produces a 2D family of "artificial'' equilibria, that can be parametrised by the orientation of the sail. We will describe the dynamics around some of these "artificial'' equilibrium points. We note that, due to the solar radiation pressure, the system is Hamiltonian only for two cases: when the sail is perpendicular to the Sun - Sail line; and when the sail is aligned with the Sun - sail line (i.e., no sail effect). The main tool used to understand the dynamics is the computation of centre manifolds. The second example is the dynamics of a Solar sail close to an asteroid. Note that, in this case, the effect of the sail becomes very relevant due to the low mass of the asteroid. We will use, as a model, a Hill problem plus the effect of the Solar radiation pressure, and we will describe some aspects of the natural dynamics of the sail.

One of the major tools in the study of periodic solutions of Hamiltonian systems is the Maslov-type index theory for symplectic matrix paths. In this lecture, I shall give first a brief introduction on the Maslov-type index theory for symplectic matrix paths as well as the iteration theory of this index. As an application of these theories I shall give a brief survey about the existence, multiplicity and stability problems on periodic solution orbits of Hamiltonian systems with prescribed energy, especially those obtained in recent years. I shall also briefly explain some ideas in these studies, and propose some open problems.

The nonlinear wave equation: u_{tt} - c(u)[c(u)u_x]_x = 0 is a natural generalization of the linear wave equation. In this talk, we will discuss a recent breakthrough addressing the Lipschitz continuous dependence of solutions on initial data for this quasi-linear wave equation. Our earlier results showed that this equation determines a unique flow of conservative solution within the natural energy space H^1(R). However, this flow is not Lipschitz continuous with respect to the H^1 distance, due to the formation of singularity. To prove the desired Lipschitz continuous property, we constructed a new Finsler type metric, where the norm of tangent vectors is defined in terms of an optimal transportation problem. For paths of piecewise smooth solutions, we carefully estimated how the distance grows in time. To complete the construction, we proved that the family of piecewise smooth solutions is dense, following by an application of Thom's transversality theorem. This is a collaboration work with Alberto Bressan.

The study of random Hamilton-Jacobi PDE is motivated by mathematical physics, and in particular, the study of random Burgers equations. We will show that, almost surely, there is a unique stationary solution, which also has better regularity than expected. The solution to any initial value problem converges to the stationary solution exponentially fast. These properties are closely related to the hyperbolicity of global minimizer for the underlying Lagrangian system. Our result generalizes the one-dimensional result of E, Khanin, Mazel and Sinai to arbitrary dimensions. Based on joint works with K. Khanin and R. Iturriaga.