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Now showing 1 - 10 of 193
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    Quantum diffusion
    (Oberwolfach : Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach gGmbH, 2015) Knowles, Antti
    If you place a drop of ink into a glass of water, the ink will slowly dissipate into the surrounding water until it is perfectly mixed. If you record your experiment with a camera and play the film backwards, you will see something that is never observed in the real world. Such diffusive and irreversible behaviour is ubiquitous in nature. Nevertheless, the fundamental equations that describe the motion of individual particles – Newton’s and Schrödinger’s equations – are reversible in time: a film depicting the motion of just a few particles looks as realistic when played forwards as when played backwards. In this snapshot, we discuss how one may try to understand the origin of diffusion starting from the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics.
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    Towards a Mathematical Theory of Turbulence in Fluids
    (Oberwolfach : Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach gGmbH, 2016) Bedrossian, Jacob
    Fluid mechanics is the theory of how liquids and gases move around. For the most part, the basic physics are well understood and the mathematical models look relatively simple. Despite this, fluids display a dazzling mystery to their motion. The random-looking, chaotic behavior of fluids is known as turbulence, and it lies far beyond our mathematical understanding, despite a century of intense research.
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    Operator theory and the singular value decomposition
    (Oberwolfach : Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach gGmbH, 2014) Knese, Greg
    This is a snapshot about operator theory and one of its fundamental tools: the singular value decomposition (SVD). The SVD breaks up linear transformations into simpler mappings, thus unveiling their geometric properties. This tool has become important in many areas of applied mathematics for its ability to organize information. We discuss the SVD in the concrete situation of linear transformations of the plane (such as rotations, reflections, etc.).
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    Prony’s method: an old trick for new problems
    (Oberwolfach : Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach gGmbH, 2018) Sauer, Tomas
    In 1795, French mathematician Gaspard de Prony invented an ingenious trick to solve a recovery problem, aiming at reconstructing functions from their values at given points, which arose from a specific application in physical chemistry. His technique became later useful in many different areas, such as signal processing, and it relates to the concept of sparsity that gained a lot of well-deserved attention recently. Prony’s contribution, therefore, has developed into a very modern mathematical concept.
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    Weak solutions and weak-strong uniqueness for a thermodynamically consistent phase-field model
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2019) Lasarzik, Robert; Rocca, Elisabetta; Schimperna, Giulio
    In this paper we prove the existence of weak solutions for a thermodynamically consistent phase-field model introduced in [26] in two and three dimensions of space. We use a notion of solution inspired by [18], where the pointwise internal energy balance is replaced by the total energy inequality complemented with a weak form of the entropy inequality. Moreover, we prove existence of local-in-time strong solutions and, finally, we show weak-strong uniqueness of solutions, meaning that every weak solution coincides with a local strong solution emanating from the same initial data, as long as the latter exists.
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    Maximal dissipative solutions for incompressible fluid dynamics
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2019) Lasarzik, Robert
    We introduce the new concept of maximal dissipative solutions for the Navier--Stokes and Euler equations and show that these solutions exist and the solution set is closed and convex. The concept of maximal dissipative solutions coincides with the concept of weak solutions as long as the weak solutions inherits enough regularity to be unique. A maximal dissipative solution is defined as the minimizer of a convex functional and we argue that this definition bears several advantages.
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    Tropical geometry
    (Oberwolfach : Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach gGmbH, 2018) Brugallé, Erwan; Itenberg, Ilia; Shaw, Kristin; Viro, Oleg
    What kind of strange spaces hide behind the enigmatic name of tropical geometry? In the tropics, just as in other geometries, one of the simplest objects is a line. Therefore, we begin our exploration by considering tropical lines. Afterwards, we take a look at tropical arithmetic and algebra, and describe how to define tropical curves using tropical polynomials.
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    Footballs and donuts in four dimensions
    (Oberwolfach : Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach gGmbH, 2016) Klee, Steven
    In this snapshot, we explore connections between the mathematical areas of counting and geometry by studying objects called simplicial complexes. We begin by exploring many familiar objects in our three dimensional world and then discuss the ways one may generalize these ideas into higher dimensions.
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    Uniformly positive correlations in the dimer model and phase transition in lattice permutations in $mathbbZ^d, d > 2$, via reflection positivity
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2019) Taggi, Lorenzo
    Our first main result is that correlations between monomers in the dimer model in ℤd do not decay to zero when d > 2. This is the first rigorous result about correlations in the dimer model in dimensions greater than two and shows that the model behaves drastically differently than in two dimensions, in which case it is integrable and correlations are known to decay to zero polynomially. Such a result is implied by our more general, second main result, which states the occurrence of a phase transition in the model of lattice permutations, which is related to the quantum Bose gas. More precisely, we consider a self-avoiding walk interacting with lattice permutations and we prove that, in the regime of fully-packed loops, such a walk is `long' and the distance between its end-points grows linearly with the diameter of the box. These results follow from the derivation of a version of the infrared bound from a new general probabilistic settings, with coloured loops and walks interacting at sites and walks entering into the system from some `virtual' vertices.
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    Modeling polycrystalline electrode-electrolyte interfaces: The differential capacitance
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2019) Fuhrmann, Jürgen; Landstorfer, Manuel; Müller, Rüdiger
    We present and analyze a model for polycrystalline electrode surfaces based on an improved continuum model that takes finite ion size and solvation into account. The numerical simulation of finite size facet patterns allows to study two limiting cases: While for facet size diameter $d^facet to 0$ we get the typical capacitance of a spatially homogeneous but possible amorphous or liquid surface, in the limit $L^Debye << d^facet$ , an ensemble of non-interacting single crystal surfaces is approached. Already for moderate size of the facet diameters, the capacitance is remarkably well approximated by the classical approach of adding the single crystal capacities of the contributing facets weighted by their respective surface fraction. As a consequence, the potential of zero charge is not necessarily attained at a local minimum of capacitance, but might be located at a local capacitance maximum instead. Moreover, the results show that surface roughness can be accurately taken into account by multiplication of the ideally flat polycrystalline surface capacitance with a single factor. In particular, we find that the influence of the actual geometry of the facet pattern in negligible and our theory opens the way to a stochastic description of complex real polycrystal surfaces.