Summer School in Mathematical Physics in Vietnam

Phan Thanh Nam (LMU Munich) and I have been organizing a Summer School series in Mathematical Physics in Vietnam, hosted by the Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (VIASM) and local universities in Vietnam, first in Hanoi (2022), then Quy Nhon (2023), and the next one is in Hue (2024). The goal of the summer school series is to bring together leading international experts, young researchers, and students from the diverse areas of mathematical physics and partial differential equations to disseminate the recent developments and to train the next generation scientists in the field.

This is to initiate a long-term collaborative program to promote and develop a mathematical physics community in Vietnam and neighboring countries in Asia. The summer school features some selected topics of current research in mathematical physics in a broad sense, focusing on open problems in classical and quantum mechanics as well as related mathematical questions in spectral theory, functional analysis, partial differential equations, geometry and probability. Both undergraduate and graduate students from all over Vietnam and the world with diverse backgrounds are encouraged to attend and participate in the summer school.

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The inviscid limit problem for Navier-Stokes equations

A longstanding open problem is to establish the inviscid limit of classical solutions to the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for smooth initial data on a domain with boundaries. The question is of great physical and mathematical interest, and it deeply links to the transition to turbulence in fluids that may possibly take place faster than expected due to the presence of a boundary. In this article, I shall give a quick overview of this subject, and then highlight some recent works with my former student, Trinh T. Nguyen, (currently a Van Vleck Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison), whose main results establish the inviscid limit for smooth data that are only required to be analytic locally near the boundary. This may be the best possible type of positive results that one can hope for, given the known violent instabilities at the boundary, which I shall discuss below. Before getting on, this picture should already hint at the great delicacy in studying boundary layers (source internet):

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Dispersion for Schrödinger equations

The Schrödinger equation forms the basic principles of quantum mechanics (like that of Newton’s second law in classical mechanics). It also plays an important role in describing waves at an appropriate regime in classical fluid dynamics (e.g., water waves) and plasma physics (e.g., Langmuir’s waves or oscillations in a plasma!). In this quick note, I shall present a few basic properties and classical results for the Schrödinger equations, focusing mainly on the defocusing cubic nonlinear equations

\displaystyle i\partial_t u + \Delta u = |u|^2 u \ \ \ \ \ (1)

on {\mathbb{R}_+ \times \mathbb{R}^d}, {d\ge 1} (also known as the Gross-Pitaevskii equation). These notes are rather introductory and classical (e.g., Tao’s lecture notes), which I’m using as part of my lectures at the summer school that P. T. Nam and I are running this week on “the Mathematics of interacting Bose gases” at VIASM, Hanoi, Vietnam (August 1-5, 2022)!

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A roadmap to nonuniqueness of L^p weak solutions to Euler

In this post, I discuss a rather classical roadmap to obtain the non-uniqueness of {L^p} weak solutions to the classical incompressible Euler equations; namely, focusing on the two-dimensional case, which reads in the vorticity formulation for vorticity function {\omega}:

\displaystyle \partial_t \omega + v \cdot \nabla \omega = 0, \qquad v = \nabla^\perp \Delta^{-1}\omega \ \ \ \ \ (1)

on {\mathbb{R}^2}, with initial vorticity in {L^p} (hence, vorticity remains in {L^p} for all times). It’s known, going far back to Yudovich ’63, that weak solutions with bounded vorticity are unique, leaving open the question of uniqueness of solutions whose vorticity is only in {L^p} for {p\in [1,\infty)}. This blog post is to discuss the possible quick roadmap to proving nonuniqueness arising from the instability nature of fluid models, focusing on the Euler equations (1).

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Notes on the large time of Euler equations and inviscid damping

Consider the classical incompressible Euler equations in two dimension; namely written in the vorticity formulation, the transport equation for the unknown scalar vorticity {\omega = \omega(t,x,y)},

\displaystyle \partial_t \omega + (u \cdot \nabla) \omega =0

posed on a spatial domain {\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^2}, where the velocity field {u\in \mathbb{R}^2} is obtained through the Biot-Savart law {u = \nabla^\perp \Delta^{-1} \omega}  (with convention (a_1,a_2)^\perp = (a_2,-a_1)). By construction, the velocity field {u} is incompressible: {\nabla \cdot u=0}. When dealing with domains with a boundary, {\Delta^{-1} } is defined together with a Dirichlet boundary condition that corresponds to the no-penetration condition of fluids {u\cdot n =0} on the boundary.

The global well-posedness theory of 2D Euler is classical: (1) smooth initial data give rise to solutions that remain smooth for all times (e.g. the Beale-Kato-Majda criterium holds, as vorticity is uniformly bounded for all times; in fact, being transported along the volume-preserving flow, all {L^p} norms of vorticity are conserved), and (2) weak solutions with bounded vorticity are unique (see Yudovich ’63).

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Generator functions and their applications

The Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem is a classical convenient tool to construct analytic solutions to partial differential equations, which allows one to view and treat them as if they are ordinary differential equations:

\displaystyle u_t = F(t,x,u,u_x)

for unknown functions {u(t,x)} in {t\ge 0} and {x\in \mathbb{R}^d} (or some spatial domain). Roughly, if {F(t,x,u,w)} is locally analytic near a point {(0,x_0,u_0,w_0)} then the PDE has a unique solution {u(t,x)} which is analytic near {(0,x_0)}, as established by Cauchy (1842) and generalized by Kovalevskaya as part of her dissertation (1875). The theorem has found many applications such as in fluid dynamics and kinetic theory where it is used to provide existence of analytic solutions including those that are obtained at certain asymptotic limits (e.g., inviscid limit, Boltzmann-to-fluid limit, Landau damping, inviscid damping,…). There are modern formulations of the abstract theorem: see, for instance, Asano, Baouendi and Goulaouic, Caflisch, Nirenberg, and Safonov. In this blog post, I present generator functions, as an alternative approach to the use of the Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem, recently introduced in my joint work with E. Grenier (ENS Lyon), and discuss the versatility and simplicity of their use to applications. In addition to providing existence of analytic solutions, I will also mention another use of generator functions to capture some physics that would be otherwise missed for analytic data (namely, an analyticity framework to capture physical phenomena that are not seen for analytic data!).

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Landau damping and extra dissipation for plasmas in the weakly collisional regime

Sanchit Chaturvedi (Stanford), Jonathan Luk (Stanford), and I just submitted the paper “The Vlasov–Poisson–Landau system in the weakly collisional regime”, where we prove Landau damping and extra dissipation for plasmas modeled by the physical Vlasov-Poisson-Landau system in the weakly collisional regime {\nu\ll1}, where {\nu} is the collisional parameter. The results are obtained for Sobolev data that are {\nu^{1/3}}-close to global Maxwellians on the torus {\mathbb{T}_x^3\times \mathbb{R}_v^3}. While Landau damping is a classical subject in plasma physics that predicts mixing and relaxation without dissipation of the electric field in a plasma, extra dissipation arises due to the interplay between phase mixing and entropic relaxation, or between transport and diffusion, which enhances decay to a faster rate than the usual diffusion rate. In this blog post, I give a flavor of the proof of our results, where we develop a purely energy method which combines Guo’s weighted energy method with the hypocoercive energy method and the Klainerman’s vector field method.

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Plasma echoes near stable Penrose data

Echoes in a plasma are the excitement of new waves due to nonlinear interaction. The excitement may happen at an arbitrarily large time, which is the main source of difficulties in understanding Landau damping. For analytic data, the echoes are suppressed as the electric field is exponentially localized in time, and the nonlinear Landau damping holds for such data, as was first obtained by Mouhot and Villani in their celebrated work (Acta Math 2011; see also the extension to include Gevrey data). The nonlinear Landau damping remains largely elusive for less regular data (e.g., data with Sobolev regularity).

Recently, in a collaboration with E. Grenier (ENS Lyon) and I. Rodnianski (Princeton), we give an elementary proof of the known Landau damping results, which I also blogged it here, that were seen as a perturbation of the free transport dynamics, whose damping is direct (that is, the phase mixing). In the companion paper with E. Grenier and I. Rodnianski, we construct a class of echo solutions, which are arbitrarily large in any Sobolev spaces (in particular, they do not belong to the analytic or Gevrey classes studied by Mouhot and Villani), but nonetheless, the nonlinear Landau damping holds. In this blog post, I shall briefly discuss the plasma echo mechanism and our new results.

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Landau damping for analytic and Gevrey data

Landau damping is a classical subject in Plasma Physics, which studies decay of the electric field in a collisionless plasma in the large time. The damping was discovered and fully understood by Landau in the 40s for the linearized evolution near Maxwellians, and later extended by O. Penrose in the 60s for general spatially homogenous equilibria. The first mathematical proof of the nonlinear Landau damping was given by Mouhot and Villani for analytic data in their celebrated work (Acta Math, 2011). Their proof was then simplified, and the result was extended by Bedrossian, Masmoudi, and Mouhot to include data in certain Gevrey classes (Annals of PDEs, 2016).

Recently, in a collaboration with E. Grenier (ENS Lyon) and I. Rodnianski (Princeton), we give an elementary proof of these same results, which I shall give a sketch of it in this blog post. To avoid some tedious algebra, I mainly focus on the analytic case, which is precisely the case originally studied by Mouhot and Villani, leaving some remarks to the Gevrey cases at the very end of the post, where you’ll also find the slides of my recent lectures over Zoom on this topics.

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Bob Glassey

I am sadden to learn that Bob Glassey, a Professor Emeritus at Indiana, passed away this weekend after a long illness. Bob was a pioneer in the mathematical study of kinetic theory and nonlinear wave equations. He, together with Walter Strauss, was the first to initiate the mathematical study of Vlasov-Maxwell systems that describe the dynamics of a collisionless plasma. One of his fundamental theorems, known as Glassey-Strauss’ theorem (ARMA 1986), is to assert that solutions to the relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system in the three dimensional space do not develop singularities as long as the velocity support remains bounded. The latter condition was subsequently verified by him and his former PhD student Jack Schaeffer for the case of low dimensions; namely, when particles are limited to one or two spatial domains. Their work has inspired several attempts from the mathematical community to tackle the full three dimensional case, which remains an outstanding open problem in the field.

Together with J. Schaeffer, Bob was also one of the first to initiate the mathematical study of Landau damping for Vlasov-Poisson systems in the presence of low frequency (or unconfined spatial domain). More precisely, for confined plasma (say, plasma on a torus), it was discovered and fully understood by Landau in the 40s that at the linearized level near a Gaussian, the electric field decays exponentially or polynomially depending on the regularity of initial data in the large time. The linear Landau damping remains to hold for more general spatially homogenous equilibria, known as Penrose stable equilibria. Later, Mouhot and Villani (Acta Math, 2011) verified this damping for data with analyticity for the nonlinear equations. In the unconfined case, Glassey and Schaeffer proved that the linear damping holds and is optimal at a much slower rate, which is surprisingly worse for Gaussians, due to the failure of the Penrose stability condition that holds in the confined case.

Bob also made fundamental and beautiful studies on the blowup issue for semilinear Heat, Wave, and Schr\”odinger (e.g., the Glassey’s trick), among other things. His book “The Cauchy problem in kinetic theory (SIAM 1996)” remains a fundamental textbook in the field.

Although Bob was already retired when I came to Indiana for my graduate study, he kindly participated and generously offered valuable guidances in a working seminar that I ran on the DiPerna-Lions theory for Boltzmann equations in the summer of 2008.

Landau damping for screened Vlasov-Poisson on the whole space

In a recent joint work with Daniel Han-Kwan (CMLS, Ecole polytechnique) and Frédéric Rousset (Paris-Sud University), we give an alternative proof of the Landau damping for screened Vlasov-Poisson system near stable homogenous equilibria on the whole space, a result that was first established by Bedrossian, Masmoudi and Mouhot, for data with finite Sobolev regularity (they remarked that 36 derivatives were sufficient).

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Dafermos and Rodnianski’s r^p-weighted approach to decay for wave equations

Dafermos and Rodnianski introduced an {r^p}-weighted vector field method to obtain boundedness and decay of solutions to wave equations on a Lorentzian background, avoiding to use global vector field multipliers and commutators with weights in {t} and thus proving to be more robust in dealing with black holes such as in Schwarzschild and Kerr background metrics. The approach has found numerous applications; see, for instance, Dafermos-Rodnianski, Moschidis, or Keir for many insightful discussions. In this blog post, I will give some basic details of this approach, based on lecture notes of S. Klainerman, focusing mostly on the flat Minkowski spacetime.

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Mourre’s theory and local decay estimates, with some applications to linear damping in fluids

In his famous 1981 paper, Mourre gave a sufficient condition for a self-adjoint operator {H} to assure the absence of its singular continuous spectrum. More precisely, consider a self-adjoint operator {H} on a Hilbert space {\mathcal{H}} (e.g., {L^2} with the usual norm), and assume that there is a self-adjoint operator {A}, called a conjugate operator of {H} on an interval {I\subset \mathbb{R}}, so that

\displaystyle P_I i[H,A] P_I \ge \theta_I P_I + P_I K P_I \ \ \ \ \ (1)

for some positive constant {\theta_I} and some compact operator {K} on {\mathcal{H}}, where {P_I} denotes the spectral projection of {H} onto {I}, the commutator {[H,A] = HA - AH}, and the inequality is understood in the sense of self-adjoint operators.

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L-infinity instability of Prandtl layers

In 1904, Prandtl introduced his famous boundary layer theory in order to describe the behavior of solutions of incompressible Navier Stokes equations near a boundary as the viscosity goes to 0. His Ansatz was that the solution of Navier Stokes equations can be described as a solution of Euler equations, plus a boundary layer corrector, plus a vanishing error term in L^\infty in the inviscid limit.

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Bardos-Degond’s solutions to Vlasov-Poisson

This is part of my lecture notes on Kinetic Theory of Gases, taught at Penn State last semester, Fall 2017. In this part, I’d like to introduce this nice Bardos-Degond 1985’s global solutions to the Vlasov-Poisson system. Of course, the global smooth solutions are already constructed, without any restriction on size of initial data (e.g., Pfaffelmoser, Schaeffer ’91; see also the previous lecture), however they give no information on their asymptotic behavior at large time. Now, for initial data that are sufficiently small near zero, Bardos and Degond were able to construct global smooth solutions that decay in large time. To my knowledge, this was the first result where dispersion is rigorously shown for kinetic equations (they appear to be motivated by similar results for nonlinear wave equations where dispersion was (still is) the key to deduce the global behavior at the large time; e.g., Klainerman, Ponce, Shatah, among others, in the early 80s).

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Stability of source defects in oscillatory media

Patterns are ubiquitous in nature, and understanding their formation and their dynamical behavior is always challenging and of great interest. Examples include patterns in fluids (e.g., Rayleigh-Benard convection between two flat plates, Taylor-Couette flow between rotating cylinders, surface waves in hydrothermal fluid flows,…), as well as in nonlinear optics, oscillatory chemical reactions and excitable biological media. Many of them arise from linear instabilities of an homogenous equilibrium, having space, time, or space-time periodic coherent structures such as wave trains (spatially periodic travelling waves). In presence of boundaries or defects, complex patterns form and thus break the symmetry or the periodic structures. Below, I shall briefly discuss some defect structures and my recent work on the subject.

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Graduate Student Seminar: Topics in Fluid Dynamics

Today, I give a Graduate Student Seminar lecture whose goal is to introduce to the first and second year graduate students at Penn State a few topics of research in Fluid Dynamics. There are many recent exciting developments in the field, which I only have time to present a few (many students haven’t taken any PDE course!). You may find the slides of my lecture here (up to many details delivered on the board!). You may also enjoy my similar lecture on Kinetic Theory of Gases, also aiming at first and second year students.

On the non-relativistic limit of Vlasov-Maxwell

In this note, I briefly explain my recent joint work with D. Han-Kwan (CNRS, Ecole polytechnique) and F. Rousset (Paris-Sud) on the non-relativistic limit of Vlassov-Maxwell. Precisely, we consider the relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system, modeling the dynamics of electrons with electron density distribution {f(t,x,v)}, which reads

\displaystyle \partial_t f + \hat v \cdot \nabla_x f + (E + \epsilon \hat v \times B)\cdot \nabla_v f = 0

on {\mathbb{T}^3\times \mathbb{R}^3}, with the relativistic velocity {\hat v = v/\sqrt{1+ \epsilon^2 |v|^2}}.

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Kinetic Theory, chapter 2: quantum models

As an analogue of the previous post dealing with the classical particles, in this post, I shall formally discuss how similar models for quantum particles arrive. These particles behave like a wave and their dynamics is governed by the Schrödinger equation. We start the chapter with some basic quantum mechanics.

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