Mathematical Physics

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The Neumann-Poincaré (NP) operator arises in boundary value problems, and plays an important role in material design, signal amplification, particle detection, etc. The spectrum of the NP operator on domains with corners was studied by Carleman before tools for rigorous discussion were created, and received a lot of attention in the past ten years. In this talk, I will present our discovery and verification of eigenvalues embedded in the continuous spectrum of this operator.

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A central question in ergodic theory is whether sequences obtained by sampling along the orbits of a given dynamical system behave similarly to sequences of i.i.d. random variables. Here we consider this question from a spectral-theoretic perspective. Specifically, we study large Hermitian matrices whose entries are defined by evaluating the exponential function along orbits of the skew-shift on the 2-torus with irrational frequency.

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The Neumann-Poincaré (NP) operator arises in boundary value problems, and plays an important role in material design, signal amplification, particle detection, etc. The spectrum of the NP operator on domains with corners was studied by Carleman before tools for rigorous discussion were created, and received a lot of attention in the past ten years. In this talk, I will present our discovery and verification of eigenvalues embedded in the continuous spectrum of this operator.

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A classical particle moving in an inverse square central force, like a planet in the gravitational field of the Sun, moves in orbits that do not precess. This lack of precession, special to the inverse square force, indicates the presence of extra conserved quantities beyond the obvious ones. Thanks to Noether's theorem, these indicate the presence of extra symmetries. It turns out that not only rotations in 3 dimensions, but also in 4 dimensions, act as symmetries of this system.
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Mathematical billiards naturally arise in mechanics, optics, acoustics, etc. They also form the most visual class of dynamical systems with evolution covering all the possible spectrum of behaviours from integrable (extremely regular) to strongly chaotic. Billiard is a (deterministic) dynamical system generated by an uniform (by inertia) motion of a point particle within a domain with piecewise smooth walls ("a billiard table"). I will introduce all needed notions on simple examples and outline some open problems.

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We consider the motion of a particle on the two-dimensional hexagonal lattice whose sites are occupied by flipping rotators, which scatter the particle according to a deterministic rule. We find that the particle's trajectory is a self-avoiding walk between returns to its initial position. We show that this behavior is a consequence of the deterministic scattering rule and the particular class of initial scatterer configurations we consider. Since self-avoiding walks are one of the main tools used to model the growth of
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Thermodynamics provides a robust conceptual framework and set of laws that govern the exchange of energy and matter. Although these laws were originally articulated for macroscopic objects, it is hard to deny that nanoscale systems, as well, often exhibit “thermodynamic-like” behavior. To what extent can the venerable laws of thermodynamics be scaled down to apply to individual microscopic systems, and what new features emerge at the nanoscale? I will review recent progress toward answering these questions, with a focus on the
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I will discuss chaos in quantum many-body systems, specifically how it is relates to thermalization and how it fails in many-body localized states. I will conjecture a new universal form for the spreading of chaos in local systems, and discuss evidence for the conjecture from a variety of sources including new large-scale simulations of quantum dynamics of spin chains.
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The three-dimensional Maxwell-Pauli-Coulomb (MPC) equations are a system of nonlinear, coupled partial differential equations describing the time evolution of a single electron interacting with its self-generated electromagnetic field and a static (infinitly heavy) nucleus of atomic number Z. The time local (and, hence, global) well-posedness of the MPC equations for any initial data is an open problem, even when Z = 0.

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