Gran Sasso Science Institute GSSI

In this talk I will review some recent results obtained in collaboration with E. Runa and A. Kerschbaum on the one-dimensionality of the minimizers
of a family of continuous local/nonlocal interaction functionals in general dimension. Such functionals have a local term, typically the perimeter or its Modica-Mortola approximation, which penalizes interfaces, and a nonlocal term favouring oscillations which are high in frequency and in amplitude. The competition between the two terms is expected by experiments and simulations to give rise to periodic patterns at equilibrium. Functionals of this type are used  to model pattern formation, either in material science or in biology. The difficulty in proving the emergence of such structures is due to the fact that the functionals are symmetric with respect to permutation of coordinates, while in more than one space dimensions minimizers are one-dimesnional, thus losing the symmetry property of the functionals. We will present new techniques and results showing that for two classes of functionals (used to model generalized anti-ferromagnetic systems, respectively  colloidal suspensions), both in sharp interface and in diffuse interface models, minimizers are one-dimensional and periodic, in general dimension and also while imposing a nontrivial volume constraint.

In this talk I will present a Perron-Frobenius type result for nonlinear eigenvector problems which allows us to compute the global maximum of a class of constrained nonconvex optimization problems involving multihomogeneous functions.

I will structure the talk into three main parts:

First, I will motivate the optimization of homogeneous functions from a graph partitioning point of view, showing an intriguing generalization of the famous Cheeger inequality.

Second, I will define the concept of multihomogeneous function and I will state our main Perron-Frobenious theorem. This theorem exploits the connection between optimization of multihomogeneous functions and nonlinear eigenvectors to provide an optimization scheme that has global convergence guarantees.

Third, I will discuss a few example applications in network science and machine learning that require the optimization of multihomogeneous functions and that can be solved using nonlinear Perron eigenvectors.

I will present recent results concerning a class of nonlinear parabolic systems of partial differential equations with small cross-diffusion (see doi.org/10.1051/m2an/2018036 and arXiv:1906.08060). Such systems can be interpreted as a perturbation of a linear problem and they have been proposed to describe the dynamics of a variety of large systems of interacting particles. I will discuss well-posedness, regularity, stability and convergence to the stationary state for (strong) solutions in an appropriate Banach space. I will also present some applications and refinements of the above-mentioned results for specific models.

"We study the hydrodynamic limit for the isothermal dynamics of an anharmonic chain under hyperbolic space-time scaling under varying tension. The temperature is kept constant by a contact with a heat bath, realised via a stochastic momentum-preserving noise added to the dynamics. The noise is designed to be large at the microscopic level, but vanishing in the macroscopic scale. Boundary conditions are also considered: one end of the chain is kept fixed, while a time-varying tension is applied to the other end. We show that the volume stretch and momentum converge to a weak solution of the isothermal Euler equations in Lagrangian coordinates with boundary conditions."

In this talk I will illustrate how solutions of nonlinear nonlocal Fokker-Planck equations in a bounded domain with no-flux boundary conditions can be approximated by Cauchy problems with increasingly strong confining potentials defined outside such domain. Two different approaches are analysed, making crucial use of uniform estimates for energy and entropy functionals respectively. In both cases we prove that the problem in a bounded domain can be seen as a limit problem in the whole space involving a suitably chosen sequence of large confining potentials.
This is joint work with Maria Bruna and José Antonio Carrillo.