Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The arithmetic quantum unique ergodicity (AQUE) conjecture predicts that the L^2 mass of Hecke-Maass cusp forms on an arithmetic hyperbolic manifold becomes equidistributed as the Laplace eigenvalue grows. If the underlying manifold is non-compact, mass could “escape to infinity”. This possibility was ruled out by Soundararajan for arithmetic surfaces, which when combined with celebrated work of Lindenstrauss completed the proof of AQUE for surfaces.

We establish non-escape of mass for Hecke-Maass cusp forms on a congruence quotient of hyperbolic 4-space. Unlike in the setting of hyperbolic 2- or 3-manifolds (for which AQUE has been proved), the number of terms in the Hecke relations is unbounded, which prevents us from naively applying Cauchy-Schwarz. We instead view the isometry group as a group of quaternionic matrices, and rely on non-commutative unique factorization, along with certain structural features of the Hecke action. Joint work with Zvi Shem-Tov.

Ice sheets are fascinating dynamical systems that flow, fracture and melt on a wide range of time scales, presenting a range of challenging prediction problems with important implications for how coastal communities plan for sea level rise. In this talk, I will introduce a few outstanding problems concerning the evolution of Earth’s ice sheets under climate change. I will start by introduce the classical theory of “marine ice sheet instability” which describes how glacier ice flows from the land to ice which floats on the ocean, and leads to a saddle-node bifurcation in ice sheet size under climate change. Many contemporary predictions of ice sheet change hold that such a bifurcation is currently unfolding at a number of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica and could lead to runaway ice sheet retreat even if global temperatures stop increasing in the future. I discuss our recent work on whether this bifurcation may actually play out as a sliding-crossing bifurcation, and the role of a stochastic climate system in driving the system through this bifurcation where nonlinearities cause evolution of the leading order moments of the distribution of glacier state.

Travelling pulses and waves are a rich subset of feasible patterns in reaction-diffusion systems. Many have investigated their existence, stability, and other properties, but what happens if the deterministic dynamics is affected by random occurrences? How does the interplay between diffusion and noise influence the velocity, curvature, and stability of multidimensional patterns?

We consider reaction-diffusion systems with multiplicative noise on a spatial domain of dimension two or higher. The noise process is white in time, coloured in space, and invariant under translations; based on applications. Inspired by previous works on the real line, we establish the multidimensional stability of planar waves on a cylindrical domain on time scales that are exponentially long with respect to the noise strength. In the deterministic setting, multidimensional stability of planar waves on the whole space has been obtained, and we show to what extend we can do this in the stochastic case.

The metastability result above is achieved by means of a stochastic phase tracking mechanism that can be maintained over such long-time scales. The corresponding mild formulation of our problem features stochastic integrals with respect to anticipating integrands, which hence cannot be understood within the well-established setting of Itô-integrals. To circumvent this problem, we exploit and extend recently developed theory concerning forward integrals.

The mean curvature flow is to evolve a hypersurface in Euclidean space using the mean curvatures at each point as the velocity field. The flow has good smoothing property, but also develops singularities. The singularities are modeled on an object called shrinkers, which give homothetic solutions to the flows. As there are infinitely many shrinkers that seem impossible to classify, it is natural to explore the idea of generic mean curvature flows that is to introduce a generic perturbation of the initial conditions. In this talk, we shall explain our work on this topic, including perturbing away nonspherical and noncylindrical shrinkers, and generic isolatedness of cylindrical singularities. The talk is based on a series of works jointly with Ao Sun.