Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We present a mean field model of electroencephalographic activity in the brain, which is composed of a system of coupled ODEs and PDEs. We show the existence and uniqueness of weak and strong solutions of this model and investigate the regularity of the solutions. We establish biophysically plausible semidynamical system frameworks and show that the semigroups of weak and strong solution operators possess bounded absorbing sets. We show that there exist parameter values for which the semidynamical systems do not possess a global attractor due to the lack of the compactness property. In this case, the internal dynamics of the ODE components of the solutions can create asymptotic spatial discontinuities in the solutions, regardless of the smoothness of the initial values and forcing terms.

For the tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system, the most important issue to address is how stable is the desirable state against random perturbations. Extreme biotic and climatic events pose severe hazards to tropical rainforests. Their local effects are extremely stochastic and difficult to measure. Moreover, the direction and intensity of the response of forest trees to such perturbations are unknown, especially given the lack of efficient dynamical vegetation models to evaluate forest tree cover changes over time. In this study, we consider randomness in the mathematical modelling of forest trees by incorporating uncertainty through a stochastic differential equation. According to field-based evidence, the interactions between fires and droughts are a more direct mechanism that may describe sudden forest degradation in the south-eastern Amazon. In modeling the Amazonian vegetation system, we include symmetric α-stable Lévy perturbations. We report results of stability analysis of the metastable fertile forest state. We conclude that even a very slight threat to the forest state stability represents L´evy noise with large jumps of low intensity, that can be interpreted as a fire occurring in a non-drought year. During years of severe drought, high-intensity fires significantly accelerate the transition between a forest and savanna state.

When perturbed with a small periodic forcing, two (or more) coupledconservative oscillators can exhibit instabilities: trajectories thatbecome unstable while accumulating ``unbounded'' energy from thesource. This is known as Arnold diffusion, and has been traditionallyapplied to celestial mechanics, for example to study the stability ofthe solar system or to explain the Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt.However, such phenomenon could be extremely useful in energyharvesting systems as well, whose aim is precisely to capture as muchenergy as possible from a source.In this talk we will show a first step towards the application ofArnold diffusion theory in energy harvesting systems. We will consideran energy harvesting system based on two piezoelectric oscillators.When forced to oscillate, for instance when driven by a small periodicvibration, such oscillators create an electrical current which chargesan accumulator (a capacitor or a battery). Unfortunately, suchoscillators are not conservative, as they are not perfectly elastic(they exhibit damping).We will discuss the persistence of normally hyperbolic invariantmanifolds, which play a crucial role in the diffusing mechanisms. Bymeans of the parameterization method, we will compute such manifoldsand their associated stable and unstable manifolds. We will alsodiscuss the Melnikov method to obtain sufficient conditions for theexistence of homoclinic intersections.

We will consider the Frenkel-Kontorova models and their higher dimensional generalizations and talk about the corresponding discrete weak KAM theory. The existence of the discrete weak KAM solutions is related to the additive eigenvalue problem in ergodic optimization. In particular, I will show that the discrete weak KAM solutions converge to the weak KAM solutions of the autonomous Tonelli Hamilton-Jacobi equations as the time step goes to zero.