Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We consider the 1+1 dimensional vector valued Principal Chiral Field model (PCF) obtained as a simplification of the Vacuum Einstein Field equations under the Belinski-Zakharov symmetry. PCF is an integrable model, but a rigorous description of its evolution is far from complete. Here we provide the existence of local solutions in a suitable chosen energy space, as well as small global smooth solutions under a certain non degeneracy condition. We also construct virial functionals which provide a clear description of decay of smooth global solutions inside the light cone. Finally, some applications are presented in the case of PCF solitons, a first step towards the study of its nonlinear stability. 

Smooth ergodic theory provides a framework for studying systems exhibiting dynamical chaos, features of which include sensitive dependence with respect to initial conditions, correlation decay (even for deterministic systems!) and complicated fractal-like attractor geometry. This talk will be an overview of some of these ideas as they apply to evolutionary PDE, with an emphasis on dissipative semilinear parabolic problems, and a discussion of some of my work in this direction, joint with: Lai-Sang Young and Sam Punshon-Smith. 

In this talk we report on recent works (with A. Cosso, I. Kharroubi, H. Pham, M. Rosestolato) on the optimal control of (possibly path dependent) McKean-Vlasov equations valued in Hilbert spaces. On the other side we present the first ideas of a work with S. Federico, D. Ghilli and M. Rosestolato, on Mean Field Games in infinite dimension.

We will begin by presenting some examples for both topics and their relations. Then most of the time will be devoted to the first topic and the main results (the dynamic programming principle, the law invariance property of the value function, the Ito formula and the fact that the value function is a viscosity solution of the HJB equation, a first comparison result).

We conclude, if time allows, with the first ideas on the solution of the HJB-FKP system arising in mean Field Games in infinite dimension.

In recent years tremendous progress was made in understanding the ``inviscid damping" phenomenon near shear flows and vortices, which are steady states for the 2d incompressible Euler equation, especially at the linearized level. However, in real fluids viscosity plays an important role. It is natural to ask if incorporating the small but crucial viscosity term (and thus considering the Navier Stokes equation in a high Reynolds number regime instead of Euler equations) could change the dynamics in any dramatic way. It turns out that for the perturbative regime near a spectrally stable monotonic shear flows in an infinite periodic channel (to avoid boundary layers and long wave instabilities), we can prove uniform-in-viscosity inviscid damping. The proof introduces techniques that provide a unified treatment of the classical Orr-Sommerfeld equation in a way analogous to Rayleigh equations.