Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In this talk I will discuss a particular fast-slow system, and describe an averaging theorem. I will also explain how this particular slow-fast system arises in a certain problem of energy transport in an open system of interacting hard-spheres. The technical aspect involved in this is how to deal with singularities present and the fact that the dynamics is fully coupled.

We consider a triangular gap of side two in a 90 degree angle on the triangular lattice with mixed boundary conditions: a constrained, zig-zag boundary along one side, and a free lattice line boundary along the other. We study the interaction of the gap with thecorner as the rest of the angle is completely filled with lozenges. We show that the resulting correlation is governed by the product of the distances between the gap and its three images in the sides of the angle. This, together with a few other results we worked out previously, provides evidence for a unified way of understanding the interaction of gaps with the boundary under mixed boundary conditions, which we present as a conjecture. Our conjecture is phrased in terms of the steady state heat flow problem in a uniform block of material in which there are a finite number of heat sources and sinks. This new physical analogy is equivalent in the bulk to the electrostatic analogy we developed in previous work, but arises as the correct one for the correlation with the boundary.The starting point for our analysis is an exact formula we prove for the number of lozenge tilings of certain trapezoidal regions with mixed boundary conditions, which is equivalent to a new, multi-parameter generalization of a classical plane partition enumeration problem (that of enumerating symmetric, self-complementary plane partitions).

A limit-periodic function on R^d is one which lies in the L^\infty closure of the space of periodic functions. Schr\"odinger operators with limit-periodic potentials may have very exotic spectral properties, despite being very close to periodic operators. Our discussion will revolve around the transition between ``thick'' spectra and ``thin'' spectra.

I will talk about what happens on the spectral transition lines for the almost Mathieu operator. This talk is based on joint works with Svetlana Jitomirskaya and Qi Zhou. For both transition lines \{\beta(\alpha)=\ln{\lambda}\} and \{\gamma(\alpha,\theta)=\ln{\lambda}\} in the positive Lyapunov exponent regime, we show purely point spectrum/purely singular continuous spectrum for dense subsets of frequencies/phases.