Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We study regularity properties of weak solutions of the homogeneous Boltzmann equation. While under the so called Grad cutoff assumption the homogeneous Boltzmann equation is known to propagate smoothness and singularities, it has long been suspected that the non-cutoff Boltzmann operator has similar coercivity properties as a fractional Laplace operator. This has led to the hope that the homogenous Boltzmann equation enjoys similar smoothing properties as the heat equation with a fractional Laplacian. We prove that any weak solution of the fully nonlinear non-cutoff homogenous Boltzmann equation (for Maxwellian molecules) with initial datum $f_0$ with finite mass, energy and entropy, that is, $f_0 \in L^1_2(\R^d) \cap L \log L(\R^d)$, immediately becomes Gevrey regular for strictly positive times, i.e. it gains infinitely many derivatives and even (partial) analyticity.This is achieved by an inductive procedure based on very precise estimates of nonlinear, nonlocal commutators of the Boltzmann operator with suitable test functions involving exponentially growing Fourier multipliers.(Joint work with Jean-Marie Barbaroux, Dirk Hundertmark, and Semjon Vugalter)

For a given generic form, the problem of finding the nearest rank-one form with respect to the Bombieri norm is well-studied and completely solved for binary forms. Nonetheless, higher-rank approximation is quite mysterious except in the quadratic case. In this talk we will discuss such problems in the binary case.

In this talk I will present my recent result about the ergodic properties of nonequilibrium steady-state (NESS) for a stochastic energy exchange model. The energy exchange model is numerically reduced from a billiards-like deterministic particle system that models the microscopic heat conduction in a 1D chain. By using a technique called the induced chain method, I proved the existence, uniqueness, polynomial speed of convergence to the NESS, and polynomial speed of mixing for the stochastic energy exchange model. All of these are consistent with the numerical simulation results of the original deterministic billiards-like system.

A classical theorem of Arnold, Moser shows that in analytic families of maps close to a rotation we can find maps which are smoothly conjugate to rotations. This is one of the first examples of the KAM theory. We aim to present a self-contained version of Moser's proof and also to present some efficient numerical algorithms.