Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

I will review recent results on small scale creation in solutions of the Euler equation. A numerical simulation due to Hou and Luo suggests a new scenario for finite time blow up in three dimensions. A similar geometry in two dimensions leads to examples with very fast, double exponential in time growth in the gradient of vorticity. Such growth is know to be sharp due to upper bounds going back to 1930s. If I have time, I will also discuss several models that have been proposed to help understand the three-dimensional case.

The Cucker-Smale system is a popular model of collective behavior of interacting agents, used, in particular, to model bird flocking and fish swarming. The underlying premise is the tendency for a local alignment of the bird (or fish, or ...) velocities. The Euler-Cucker-Smale system is an effective macroscopic PDE limit of such particle systems. It has the form of the pressureless Euler equations with a non-linear density-dependent alignment term. The alignment term is a non-linear version of the fractional Laplacian to a power alpha in (0,1). It is known that the corresponding Burgers' equation with a linear dissipation of this type develops shocks in a finite time. We show that nonlinearity enhances the dissipation, and the solutions stay globally regular for all alpha in (0,1): the dynamics is regularized due to the nonlinear nature of the alignment. This is a joint work with T. Do, A.Kiselev and C. Tan.

In 1944, L.D. Landau first discovered explicit (-1)-homogeneous solutions of 3-d stationary incompressible Navier-Stokes equations (NSE) with precisely one singularity at the origin, which are axisymmetric with no swirl. These solutions are now called Landau solutions. In 1998 G. Tian and Z. Xin proved that all solutions which are (-1) homogeneous, axisymmetric with one singularity are Landau solutions. In 2006 V. Sverak proved that with just the (-1)-homogeneous assumption Landau solutions are the only solutions with one singularity. He also proved that there are no such solutions in dimension greater than 3. Our work focuses on the (-1)-homogeneous solutions of 3-d incompressible stationary NSE with finitely many singularities on the unit sphere.In this talk we will first classify all (-1)-homogeneous axisymmetric no-swirl solutions of 3-d stationary incompressible NSE with one singularity at the south pole on the unit sphere as a two dimensional solution surface. We will then present our results on the existence of a one parameter family of (-1)-homogeneous axisymmetric solutions with non-zero swirl and smooth on the unit sphere away from the south pole, emanating from the two dimensional surface of axisymmetric no-swirl solutions. We will also present asymptotic behavior of general (-1)-homogeneous axisymmetric solutions in a cone containing the south pole with a singularity at the south pole on the unit sphere. We also constructed families of solutions smooth on the unit sphere away from the north and south poles.This is a joint work with Professor Yanyan Li and Li Li.

For a map u from a Riemann surface M to a Riemannian manifold and a>1, the a-energy functional is defined as E_a(u)=\int_M |\nabla u|^{2a}dx. We call u_a a sequence of Sacks-Uhlenbeck maps if u_a is a critical point of E_a, and sup_{a>1} E_a(u_a)<\infty. In this talk, when the target manifold is a standard sphere S^K, we prove the energy identity for a sequence of Sacks-Uhlenbeck maps during blowing up.