A lubrication model can be used to describe the dynamics of a weakly volatile viscous fluid layer on a hydrophobic substrate. Thin layers of the fluid are unstable to perturbations and break up into slowly evolving interacting droplets. In this talk, we will present a reduced-order dynamical system derived from the lubrication model based on the nearest-neighbour droplet interactions in the weak condensation limit. Dynamics for periodic arrays of identical drops and pairwise droplet interactions are investigated which provide insights to the coarsening dynamics of a large droplet system. Weak condensation is shown to be a singular perturbation, fundamentally changing the long-time coarsening dynamics for the droplets and the overall mass of the fluid in two additional regimes of long-time dynamics. This is joint work with Thomas Witelski.

We study the large-population limit of interacting particle systems posed on weighted random graphs. In that aim, we introduce a general framework for the construction of weighted random graphs, generalizing the concept of graphons. We prove that as the number of particles tends to infinity, the finite-dimensional particle system converges in probability to the solution of a deterministic graph-limit equation, in which the graphon prescribing the interaction is given by the first moment of the weighted random graph law. We also study interacting particle systems posed on switching weighted random graphs, which are obtained by resetting the weighted random graph at regular time intervals. We show that these systems converge to the same graph-limit equation, in which the interaction is prescribed by a constant-in-time graphon.

Plateau's problem asks whether every boundary curve in 3-space is spanned by an area minimizing surface. Various interpretations of this problem have been solved using eg. geometric measure theory. Froehlich and Struwe proposed a PDE approach, in which the desired surface is produced using smooth sections of a twisted line bundle over the complement of the boundary curve. The idea is to consider sections of this bundle which minimize an analogue of the Allen--Cahn functional (a classical model for phase transition phenomena) and show that these concentrate energy on a solution of Plateau's problem. After some background on the link between phase transition models and minimal surfaces, I will describe new work with Marco Guaraco in which we produce smooth solutions of Plateau's problem using this approach. 

We establish exponentially-fast mixing for passive scalars driven by two well-known examples of random divergence-free vector fields. The first one is the alternating shear flow model proposed by Pierrehumbert, in which case we set up a dynamics-based framework to construct such space-time smooth universal exponential mixers. The second example is the statistically stationary, homogeneous, isotropic Kraichnan model of fluid turbulence. In this case, the proof follows a new explicit identity for the evolution of negative Sobolev norms of the scalar. This is based on joint works with Alex Blumenthal (Georgia Tech) and Michele Coti Zelati (ICL), and Michele Coti Zelati and Theodore Drivas (Stony Brook), respectively.