Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The two dimensional Euler equation is globally wellposed, but the long time behavior of solutions is not well understood. Generically, it is conjectured that the vorticity, due to mixing, should weakly but not strongly converge as $t\to\infty$. In an important work, Bedrossian and Masmoudi studied the perturbative regime near Couette flow $(y,0)$ on an infinite cylinder, and proved small perturbation in the Gevrey space relaxes to a nearby shear flow. In this talk, we will explain a recent extension to the case of a finite cylinder (i.e. a periodic channel) with perturbations in a critical Gevrey space for this problem. The main interest of this extension is to consider the natural boundary effects, and to ensure that the Couette flow in our domain has finite energy. Joint work with Alex Ionescu.

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.

Hypothesis testing of structure in covariance matrices is of significant importance, but faces great challenges in high-dimensional settings. Although consistent frequentist one-sample covariance tests have been proposed, there is a lack of simple, computationally scalable, and theoretically sound Bayesian testing methods for large covariance matrices. Motivated by this gap and by the need for tests that are powerful against sparse alternatives, we propose a novel testing framework based on the maximum pairwise Bayes factor. Our initial focus is on one-sample covariance testing; the proposed test can optimally distinguish null and alternative hypotheses in a frequentist asymptotic sense. We then propose diagonal tests and a scalable covariance graph selection procedure that are shown to be consistent. Further, our procedure can effectively control false positives. A simulation study evaluates the proposed approach relative to competitors. The performance of our graph selection method is demonstrated through applications to a sonar data set.

The Shadowing lemma describes the behaviour of pseudo-orbits near a hyperbolic invariant set. In this talk, I will present an analytic proof of the shadowing lemma for discrete flows. This is a work by K. R. Meyer and George R. Sell.