Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We prove the existence and the linear stability of Cantor families of small amplitude time quasi-periodic standing water wave solutions - i.e. periodic and even in the space variable x - of a bi-dimensional ocean with finite depth under the action of pure gravity. Such a result holds for all the values of the depth parameter in a Borel set of asymptotically full measure. This is a small divisor problem. The main difficulties are the quasi-linear nature of the gravity water waves equations and the fact that the linear frequencies grow just in a sublinear way at infinity. To overcome these problems, we first reduce the linearized operators obtained at each approximate quasi-periodic solution along the Nash-Moser iteration to constant coefficients up to smoothing operators, using pseudo-differential changes of variables that are quasi-periodic in time. Then we apply a KAM reducibility scheme that requires very weak Melnikov non-resonance conditions (which lose derivatives both in time and space), which we are able to verify for most values of the depth parameter using degenerate KAM theory arguments. This is a joint work with P. Baldi, M. Berti and R. Montalto.

Although the Alexander polynomial does not satisfy an unoriented skein relation, Manolescu (2007) showed that there exists an unoriented skein exact triangle for knot Floer homology. In this talk, we will describe some developments in this direction since then, including a combinatorial proof using grid homology and extensions to the Petkova-Vertesi tangle Floer homology (joint work with Ina Petkova) and Zarev's bordered sutured Floer homology (joint work with Shea Vela-Vick).

A tight k-uniform \ell-cycle, denoted by TC_\ell^k, is a k-uniform hypergraph whose vertex set is v_0, ..., v_{\ell-1}, and the edges are all the k-tuples {v_i, v_{i+1}, \cdots, v_{i+k-1}}, with subscripts modulo \ell. Motivated by a classic result in graph theory that every n-vertex cycle-free graph has at most n-1 edges, Sos and, independently, Verstraete asked whether for every integer k, a k-uniform n-vertex hypergraph without any tight k-uniform cycles has at most \binom{n-1}{k-1} edges. In this talk I will present a construction giving negative answer to this question, and discuss some related problems. Joint work with Jie Ma.

The expectation values of the first and second moments of the quantum mechanical spin operator can be used to define a spin vector and spin fluctuation tensor, respectively. The former is a vector inside the unit ball in three space, while the latter is represented by an ellipsoid in three space. They are both experimentally accessible in many physical systems. By considering transport of the spin vector along loops in the unit ball it is shown that the spin fluctuation tensor picks up geometric phase information. For the physically important case of spin one, the geometric phase is formulated in terms of an SO(3) operator. Loops defined in the unit ball fall into two classes: those which do not pass through the origin and those which pass through the origin. The former class of loops subtend a well defined solid angle at the origin while the latter do not and the corresponding geometric phase is non-Abelian. To deal with both classes, a notion of generalized solid angle is introduced, which helps to clarify the interpretation of the geometric phase information. The experimental systems that can be used to observe this geometric phase are also discussed.Link to arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08564