Year: 2020

Plasma echoes near stable Penrose data

ttn12 Kinetic theory, Plasma Physics , ,

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

ttn12 Kinetic theory, Plasma Physics ,

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

ttn12 Uncategorized

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.