On spectral stability for solitary water waves

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 3:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Bob Pego – Carnegie Mellon University – http://www.math.cmu.edu/~bobpego/
Organizer
Chongchun Zeng
A classic story of nonlinear science started with the particle-like water wave that Russell famously chased on horseback in 1834. I will recount progress regarding the robustness of solitary waves in nonintegrable model systems such as FPU lattices, and discuss progress toward a proof (with Shu-Ming Sun) of spectral stability of small solitary waves for the 2D Euler equations for water of finite depth without surface tension.