Seminars and Colloquia by Series

The Kac Model Coupled to a Thermostat

Series
Math Physics Seminar
Time
Thursday, September 19, 2013 - 16:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Ranjini VaidyanathanGeorgia Tech
We consider a model of randomly colliding particles interacting with a thermal bath. Collisions between particles are modeled via the Kac master equation while the thermostat is seen as an infinite gas at thermal equilibrium at inverse temperature \beta. The system admits the canonical distribution at inverse temperature \beta as the unique equilibrium state. We prove that the any initial distribution approaches the equilibrium distribution exponentially fast both by computing the gap of the generator of the evolution, in a proper function space, as well as by proving exponential decay in relative entropy. We also show that the evolution propagates chaos and that the one-particle marginal, in the large system limit, satisfies an effective Boltzmann-type equation. This is joint work with Federico Bonetto and Michael Loss.

Bounds on the eigenvalues of Laplace-Beltrami operators and Witten Laplacians on Riemannian manifolds

Series
Math Physics Seminar
Time
Friday, April 19, 2013 - 15:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Ahmad El SoufiUniversité François Rabelais, Tours, France

Please Note: El Soufi will be visiting Harrell for the week leading up to this seminar

We shall survey some of the classical and recent results giving upper bounds of the eigenvalues of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on a compact Riemannian manifold (Yang-Yau, Korevaar, Grigor'yan-Netrusov-Yau, etc.). Then we discuss extensions of these results to the eigenvalues of Witten Laplacians associated to weighted volume measures and investigate bounds of these eigenvalues in terms of suitable norms of the weights.

Universal Conductivity Properties In Many Body Physics

Series
Math Physics Seminar
Time
Friday, April 12, 2013 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Vieri MastropietroUniversità degli Studi di Milano
Several low dimensional interacting fermionic systems, including g raphene and spin chains, exhibit remarkable universality properties in the c onductivity, which can be rigorously established under certain conditions by combining Renormal ization Group methods with Ward Identities.

Fast-slow partially hyperbolic systems beyond averaging.

Series
Math Physics Seminar
Time
Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Jacopo de SimoiUniversita' di Roma Tor Vergata
Lots of attention and research activity has been devoted to partially hyperbolic dynamical systems and their perturbations in the past few decades; however, the main emphasis has been on features such as stable ergodicity and accessibility rather than stronger statistical properties such as existence of SRB measures and exponential decay of correlations. In fact, these properties have been previously proved under some specific conditions (e.g. Anosov flows, skew products) which, in particular, do not persist under perturbations. In this talk, we will construct an open (and thus stable for perturbations) class of partially hyperbolic smooth local diffeomorphisms of the two-torus which admit a unique SRB measure satisfying exponential decay of correlations for Hölder observables. This is joint work with C. Liverani

Statistical Mechanics of the Two-Dimensional Coulomb Gas

Series
Math Physics Seminar
Time
Friday, April 5, 2013 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Pierluigi FalcoCalifornia State University, Northridge
The lattice, two dimensional, Coulomb gas is the prototypical model of Statistical Mechanics displaying the 'Kosterlitz-Thouless' phase transition. In this seminar I will discuss conjectures, results and works in progress about this model.

Stable regimes for hard disks in a channel with twisting walls

Series
Math Physics Seminar
Time
Friday, March 29, 2013 - 15:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Nikolai Chernov UAB
We study a gas of N hard disks in a box with semi-periodic boundary conditions. The unperturbed gas is hyperbolic and ergodic (these facts are proved for N=2 and expected to be true for all N>2). We study various perturbations by "twisting" the outgoing velocity at collisions with the walls. We show that the dynamics tends to collapse to various stable regimes, however we define the perturbations and however small they are.

Indirect Coulomb Energy for Two-Dimensional Atoms

Series
Math Physics Seminar
Time
Friday, March 8, 2013 - 15:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Rafael BenguriaP. Universidad Católica de Chile
In this talk I will discuss a family of lower bounds on the indirect Coulomb energy for atomic and molecular systems in two dimensions in terms of a functional of the single particle density with gradient correction terms

Resonances for manifolds with hyperbolic ends

Series
Math Physics Seminar
Time
Friday, February 22, 2013 - 15:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
David BorthwickEmory University
Abstract: In this talk we will survey some recent developments in the scattering theory of complete, infinite-volume manifolds with ends modeled on quotients of hyperbolic space. The theory of scattering resonances for such spaces is in many ways parallel to the classical case of eigenvalues on a compact Riemann surface. However, it is only relatively recently that progress has been made in understanding the distribution of these resonances. We will give some introduction to the theory of resonances in this context and try to sketch this recent progress. We will also discuss some interesting outstanding conjectures and present numerical evidence related to these.

Bounds on sums of graph eigenvalues

Series
Math Physics Seminar
Time
Friday, February 1, 2013 - 16:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Evans HarrellGeorgia Tech
I'll discuss two methods for finding bounds on sums of graph eigenvalues (variously for the Laplacian, the renormalized Laplacian, or the adjacency matrix). One of these relies on a Chebyshev-type estimate of the statistics of a subsample of an ordered sequence, and the other is an adaptation of a variational argument used by P. Kröger for Neumann Laplacians. Some of the inequalities are sharp in suitable senses. This is ongoing work with J. Stubbe of EPFL

A few Ways to Destroy Entropic Chaoticity

Series
Math Physics Seminar
Time
Thursday, December 6, 2012 - 16:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Amit EinavUniversity of Cambridge
In this talk we will discuss the definition of chaoticity and entropic chaoticity, as well as the background that led us to define these quantities, mainly Kac's model and the Boltzmann equation. We will then proceed to investigate the fine balance required for entropic chaoticity by exploring situations where chaoticity is valid, but not entropic chaoticity. We will give a general method to construct such states as well as two explicit example, one of which is quite surprising.

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