Polymer Depinning Transitions with Loop Exponent One

Speaker: 

Professor Ken Alexander

Institution: 

USC

Time: 

Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - 11:00am

Location: 

RH 306

We consider a polymer with configuration modeled by the trajectory of a Markov chain, interacting with a potential of form u+V_n when it visits a particular state 0 at time n, with V_n representing i.i.d. quenched disorder. There is a critical value of u above which the polymer is pinned by the potential. Typically the probability of an excursion of length n for the underlying Markov chain is taken to decay as a power of n (called the loop exponent), perhaps with a slowly varying correction. A particular case not covered in a number of previous studies is that of loop exponent one, which includes simple random walk in two dimensions. We show that in this case, at all temperatures, the critical values of u in the quenched and annealed models are equal, in contrast to all other loop exponents, for which these critical values are known to differ at least at low temperatures. The work is joint with N. Zygouras.

Kinetic evolution of multi-linear particle interactive dynamics

Speaker: 

Irene Gamba

Institution: 

University of Texas at Austin

Time: 

Thursday, May 14, 2009 - 4:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

We shall revisit the Boltzmann equation for rarefied non-linear particle dynamics, of conservative or dissipative nature, and on the stochastic N-particle model, introduced by M. Kac.
Related to this equation, we consider a a probabilistic dynamics from generalizations to N-particle model which includes multi-particle interactions. From basic symmetries and invariances for a general class of stochastic interactions, we show existence and uniqueness of states and recover the longtime dynamics and decay rates approaching stable laws characterized by self-similar rescaling, with finite or infinity energy initial data. We classify the moments integrability and see that broad tails (Pareto type) attractors are possible.

There is a large class of applications to these models including classical elastic or inelastic Maxwell type interactions with or without a thermostat, and social dynamics such as information percolation models, or wealth distributions models with Pareto tail formation.

This is work in collaboration with A. Bobylev, C. Cercignani and H. Tharkabhushanam.

Application of critical point theory to problems in partial differential equations

Speaker: 

Martin Schechter

Institution: 

UC Irvine

Time: 

Thursday, April 23, 2009 - 3:00pm

Location: 

RH 340P

For many partial differential equations and systems that arise in applications, solutions are critical points of corresponding functionals. One can solve such problems by finding the critical points. We discuss various techniques for finding them and apply the methods to specific problems. The talk can also be followed by nonspecialists and students.

Multilevel Methods for Viscoelastic Fluids Simulation

Speaker: 

Chowla Assistant Professor Chensong Zhang

Institution: 

Penn State University

Time: 

Monday, May 11, 2009 - 4:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

The link between various viscoelastic fluids models and the symmetric matrix Riccati differential equations can be a new device that brings to unified and proper ways of numerical treatments for the viscoelastic models. In this talk, we describe a few steps toward efficient numerical schemes for complex fluids simulation. First, we construct stable finite element discretizations using Eulerian--Lagrangian methods based on the Riccati formulations of the viscoelastic models. Then we develop a new multilevel time-marching scheme; together with adaptive time-stepping schemes and time parallel schemes, we can build efficient methods for complex fluids simulation. Furthermore, we discuss two robust and efficient multilevel solvers for Stokes-type systems arising at each time step in the Eulerian--Lagrangian discretization.

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