Past

The renormalized expectation value of the stress energy tensor (RSET) is an object of central importance in quantum field theory in curved space-time, but calculating this on black hole space-times is far from trivial.  The vacuum polarization (VP) of a quantum scalar field is computationally simpler and shares some features with the RSET.  In this talk we consider the properties of the VP for a massless, conformally coupled scalar field on asymptotically anti-de Sitter black holes with spherical, flat and hyperbolic horizons.  We focus on the effect of the different horizon curvature on the VP, and the role played by the boundary conditions far from the black hole.     

This is a report on work in progress with Jingyin Huang. The complement of an arrangement of linear hyperplanes in a complex vector space has a natural “Borel-Serre bordification” as a smooth manifold with corners. Its universal cover is analogous to the Borel-Serre bordification of an arithmetic lattice acting on a symmetric space as well as to the Harvey bordification of Teichmuller space. In the first case the boundary of this bordification is homotopy equivalent to a spherical building; in the second case it is homotopy equivalent to curve complex of the surface. In the case of a reflection arrangement the boundary of its universal cover is the “curve complex” of the corresponding spherical Artin group. By definition this is the simplicial complex of all conjugates of proper, irreducible, spherical parabolic subgroups in the Artin group. A cohomological method is used to show that the curve complex of a spherical Artin group has the homotopy type of a wedge of spheres.

The principal ideal theorem (1930) guaranteed that any number field K would embed into a finite extension, called the Hilbert class field of K, in which every ideal of the original field became principal -- however the Hilbert class field itself will not necessarily have class number 1. The class field tower problem asked whether iteratively taking Hilbert class fields must stabilize after finitely many steps. In 1964, it was finally answered in the negative by Golod and Shafarevich who produced infinitely many examples and pioneered the framework that is still the most common setting for deciding when a number field will have an infinite class field tower.

In this talk, I will finish the proof of their cohomological result and thus fully justify how it settled the class field tower problem.

After discussing the need for implicit constitutive relations to describe the response of both solids and fluids, I will discuss applications wherein such implicit constitutive relations can be gainfully exploited. It will be shown that such implicit relations can explain phenomena that have hitherto defied adequate explanation such as fracture and the movement of cracks in solids, the response of biological matter, and provide a new way to look at numerous non-linear phenomena exhibited by fluids. They provide a totally new and innovative way to look at the problem of Turbulence. It also turns out that classical Cauchy and Green elasticity are a small subset of the more general theory of elastic bodies defined by implicit constitutive equations. 

We discuss some results on integration of ``rough differential forms'', which are generalizations of classical (smooth) differential forms to similar objects involving Hölder continuous functions that may be nowhere differentiable. Motivations arise mainly from geometric problems related to irregular surfaces, and the techniques are naturally related to those of Rough Paths theory. We show in particular that such a geometric integration can be constructed substituting appropriately differentials with more general asymptotic expansions (of Stratonovich or Ito type) and by summing over a refining sequence of partitions, leading to a two-dimensional extension of the classical Young integral, that coincides with the integral introduced recently by R. Züst. We further show that Stratonovich sums gives an advantage allowing to weaken the requirements on Hölder exponents, and discuss some work in progress in the stochastic case. Based on joint works with E. Stepanov, G. Alberti and I. Ballieul.

For any word w in a free group of rank r>0, and any compact group G, w induces a `word map' from G^r to G by substitutions of elements of G for the letters of w. We may also choose the r elements of G independently with respect to Haar measure on G, and then apply the word map. This gives a random element of G whose distribution depends on w. An interesting observation is that this distribution doesn't change if we change w by an automorphism of the free group. It is a wide open question whether the measures induced by w on compact groups determine w up to automorphisms.
My talk will be mostly about the case G = U(n), the n by n complex unitary matrices. The technical tool we use is a precise formula for the moments of the distribution induced by w on U(n). In the formula, there is a surprising appearance of concepts from infinite group theory, more specifically, Euler characteristics of mapping class groups of surfaces. I'll explain how our formula allows us to make progress on the question described above.
This is joint work with Doron Puder (Tel Aviv).
 

Gibbs measures of nonlinear Schrödinger equations are a fundamental object used to study low-regularity solutions with random initial data. In the dispersive PDE community, this point of view was pioneered by Bourgain in the 1990s. We study the problem of the derivation of Gibbs measures as high-temperature limits of thermal states in many-body quantum mechanics.

In our work, we apply a perturbative expansion in the interaction. This expansion is then analysed by means of Borel resummation techniques. In two and three dimensions, we need to apply a Wick-ordering renormalisation procedure. Moreover, in one dimension, our methods allow us to obtain a microscopic derivation of the time-dependent correlation functions for the cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation. This is based partly on joint work with Jürg Fröhlich, Antti Knowles, and Benjamin Schlein.

Moduli spaces of polarised varieties (varieties together with an ample line bundle) are not Hausdorff in general. A basic goal of algebraic geometry is to construct a Hausdorff moduli space of some nice class of polarised varieties. I will discuss how one can achieve this goal using the theory of canonical Kähler metrics. In addition I will discuss some fundamental properties of this moduli space, for example the existence of a Weil-Petersson type Kähler metric. This is joint work with Philipp Naumann.

I will talk about supersymmetric index of 4d N=1 supersymmetric theories on S^1xM_3 which counts supersymmetric states.  
In the first part, I will discuss a general formula to describe an asymptotic behaviour of the index in the limit of shrinking S^1
which we refer to as 4d (refined) supersymmetric Cardy formula. This part is based on arXiv:1611.00380 with Lorenzo Di Pietro.
In the second part, I will apply this formula to black hole physics. I will mainly focus on superconformal index of SU(N) N=4 super Yang-Mills theory
which is expected to be dual to type IIB superstring theory on AdS_5 x S^5. We will see that the index in the large-N limit reproduces the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy
of rotating charged BPS black hole on the gravity side. Our result for finite N makes a prediction to the black hole entropy with full quantum corrections.
The second part is based on arXiv:1901.08091.

Solidification processes of liquid metal alloys,  bubble dynamics (as in Taylor flows), pinch-offs of liquid-liquid jets, the formation of polymeric membranes, or the structure of high concentration photovoltaic cells are described by the dynamics of multiphase fluids. On the other hand, in applications such as mass spectrometry, lab-on-a-chip, and electro-fluidic displays, fluids on the micro-scale associated with a dielectric medium are of interest. Moreover, in many of these applications one is interested in influencing (or controlling) the underlying phenomenon in order to reach a desired goal. Examples for the latter could be the porosity structure of a polymeric membrane to achieve certain desired filtration properties of the membrane, or to optimize a microfluidic device for the transport of pharmaceutical agents.

A promising mathematical model for the behavior of multiphase flows associated with the applications mentioned above is given by a phase-field model of Cahn-Hilliard / Navier-Stokes (CHNS) type. Some strengths of phase field (or diffuse interface) approaches are due to their ability to overcome both, analytical difficulties of topological changes, such as, e.g., droplet break-ups or the coalescence of interfaces, and numerical challenges in capturing the interface dynamics between the fluid phases. Deep quenches in solidification processes of liquid alloys or rapid wall hardening in the formation of polymer membranes ask for non-smooth energies in connection with Cahn-Hilliard models. Analytically, this gives rise to a variational inequality coupled to the equations of hydrodynamics, thus yielding a non-smooth system (in the sense that the map associated with the underlying operator equation is not necessarily Frechet differentiable). In contrast to phase-field approaches,
one may consider sharp interface models. In view of this, our microfluidic applications alluded to above are formulated in terms of  sharp interface models and Hele-Shaw flows. In this context, we are particularly interested in applications of electrowetting on dielectric (EWOD) with contact line pinning. The latter phenomenon resembles friction, yields a variational inequality of the second kind, and – once again – it results in an overall nonsmooth mathematical model of the physical process.

   In both settings described above, optimal control problems are relevant in order to influence the underlying physical process to approach a desired system state.  The associated optimization problems are delicate as the respective constraints involve non-smooth structures which render the problems degenerate and prevent a direct application of sophisticated tools for the characterization of solutions. Such characterizations are, however, of paramount importance in the design of numerical solution schemes.

This talk addresses some of the analytical challenges associated with optimal control problems involving non-smooth structures, offers pathways to solutions, and it reports on numerical results for both problem classes introduced above.
 

In this talk I will introduce the concept of the path signature and motivate its recent use in analysis of time-ordered data. I will then describe a new feature map for barcodes in persistent homology by first realizing each barcode as a path in a vector space, and then computing its signature which takes values in the tensor algebra over that vector space. The composition of these two operations — barcode to path, path to tensor series — results in a feature map that has several desirable properties for statistical learning, such as universality and characteristicness.

Mechanobiology is a field of science that aims to understand how mechanics regulate biology. It focuses on how mechanical forces and alterations in mechanical properties of cell or tissues regulate biological processes in development, physiology and disease. In fact, all these processes occur in our body, which presents a clear structural and hierarchical organization that goes from the organism to the cellular level. To advance in the understanding of all these processes at different scales requires the use of simplified representations of our body, which is normally known as modelling or equivalently the creation of a model. Different types of models can be found in the literature: in-vitro, in-vivo and in-silico models.

Here, I will present our modelling strategy in which we integrate different mathematical models and experiments in order to tackle relevant mechanical-based mechanisms in wound healing and cancer metastasis progression [1,2]. In fact, we have focused our research on individual [3] and collective cell migration [4], because it is a crucial event in all these mechanisms. Therefore, unravelling the intrinsic mechanisms that cells use to define their migration is an essential element for advancing the development of new technologies in regenerative medicine and cancer.

Due to the complexity of all these mechanisms, mathematical modelling is a relevant tool for providing deeper insight and quantitative predictions of the mechanical interplay between cells and extracellular matrix during cell migration. To assess the predictive capacity of these models, we will compare our numerical results with microfluidic-based experiments [2], which provide experimental information to test and refine the main assumptions of our models.

Actually, we design and fabricate multi-channel 3D microfluidics cell culture chips, which allow recreating the physiology and disease of one organ or any biological process with a precise control of the micro environmental factors [5]. Therefore, this kind of organ-on-a-chip experiments constitutes a novel modelling strategy of in vitro multicellular human systems that in combination with mathematical simulations provide a relevant tool for research in mechanobiology.

References

Escribano J, Chen M, Moeendarbary E, Cao X, Shenoy V, Garcia-Aznar JM, Kamm RD, Spill F.  Balance of Mechanical Forces Drives Endothelial Gap Formation and May Facilitate Cancer and Immune-Cell Extravasation. PLOS Computational Biology, in press.

The Kelvin wave is perhaps the most important of the equatorially trapped waves in the terrestrial atmosphere and ocean, and plays a role in various phenomena such as tropical convection and El Nino. Theoretically, it can be understood from the linear dynamics of a stratified fluid on an equatorial beta plane, which, with simple assumptions about the disturbance structure, leads to wavelike solutions propagating along the equator, with exponential decay in latitude. However, when the simplest possible background flow is added (with uniform latitudinal shear), the Kelvin wave (but not the other equatorial waves) becomes unstable. This happens in an extremely unusual way: there is instability for arbitrarily small nondimensional shear p, and the growth rate is proportional to exp(-1/p^2) as p->0. This in contrast to most hydrodynamic instabilities, in which the growth rate typically scales as a positive power of p-p_c as the control parameter p passes through a critical value p_c.

This Kelvin wave instability has been established numerically by Natarov and Boyd, who also speculated as to the underlying mathematical cause. Here we show how the growth rate and full spatial structure of the instability may be derived using matched asymptotic expansions applied to the (linear) equations of motion. This involves an adventure with Whittaker functions in the exponentially-decaying tails of the Kelvin waves, and a trick to reveal the exponentially small growth rate from a formulation that only uses regular perturbation expansions. Numerical verification of the analysis is also interesting and challenging, since special high-precision solutions of the governing ODE are required even when the nondimensional shear is not that small (circa 0.5).

Data analysis techniques are often highly domain specific - there are often certain patterns which should be in certain types of data but may not be apparent in data. The first part of the talk will cover a technique for finding such patterns through a tool which combines visual analytics and machine learning to provide insight into temporal multivariate data. The second half of the talk will discuss recent work on imposing high level geometric  structure into continuous optimizations including deep neural networks.
 

For a family of proper hyperbolic complex curves $f: X \longrightarrow \Delta^*$ over a puntured disc $\Delta^*$ with semistable reduction at the center, Oda proved, with transcendental methods, that the outer monodromy action of $\pi_1(\Delta^*) \cong \mathbb{Z}$ on the classical unipotent fundamental group of the generic fiber of $f$ is trivial if and only if $f$ has good reduction at the center. In this talk I explain a joint work with B. Chiarellotto and A. Shiho in which we give a purely algebraic proof of Oda's result.

Topological quantum field theories (TQFTs) are an extensively studied scheme for constructing invariants of manifolds, inspired by physics. In this talk, we will discuss a particular flavour of TQFT, where we equip our manifolds with principal bundles for some finite group. After introducing TQFTs and this particular flavour, I will discuss games one can play with these TQFTs, and a possible strategy for classifying equivariant TQFTs in three dimensions. 

As parallel computers approach Exascale (10^18 floating point operations per second), processor failure and data corruption are of increasing concern. Numerical linear algebra solvers are at the heart of many scientific and engineering applications, and with the increasing failure rates, they may fail to compute a solution or produce an incorrect solution. It is therefore crucial to develop novel parallel linear algebra solvers capable of providing correct solutions on unreliable computing systems. The common way to mitigate failures in high performance computing systems consists of periodically saving data onto a reliable storage device such as a remote disk. But considering the increasing failure rate and the ever-growing volume of data involved in numerical simulations, the state-of-the-art fault-tolerant strategies are becoming time consuming, therefore unsuitable for large-scale simulations. In this talk, we will present a  novel class of fault-tolerant algorithms that do not require any additional resources. The key idea is to leverage the knowledge of numerical properties of solvers involved in a simulation to regenerate lost data due to system failures. We will also share the lessons learned and report on the numerical properties and the performance of the new resilience algorithms.

Function solutions to linear PDEs often carry rigidity properties directly associated to the equation they satsify. However, the realm of solutions covers a much larger sets of solutions. For instance, we can speak of measure solutions, as opposed to classical $C^\infty$ functions or even $L^p$ functions. It is only logical to expect that the “better” space the solution lives in, the more rigid its properties will be.

Measure solutions lie just at a comfortable half of this threshold: it is a sufficently large space which allows for a rich range of new structures; but is sufficiently rigid to preserve a meaningful geometrical pattern. For example, have you ever wondered how gradients look like in the space of measures? What about other PDE structures? In this talk I will discuss these general questions, a few examples of them, and a new theoretical approach to its understanding via PDE theory, harmonic analysis, and geometric measure theory methods.

In 1996 using techniques from model theory and intersection theory, Hrushovski obtained a generalisation of the Lang-Weil estimates. Subsequently the estimates have found applications in group theory, algebraic dynamics and algebraic geometry. We shall discuss a geometric proof of the non-uniform version of these estimates.

Property (FA) is one of the `rigidity properties’ defined for groups, concerning the way a group can act on trees. We’ll take a look at why you might be interested in an action on a tree, what the property is, and then investigate which automorphism groups of free products have it.