arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Andrea Signori.
In this paper we will describe a parallel between phenomenological and symmetry-based descriptions of the process dependence of the time-reversal-odd phenomena in QCD, such as the Sivers effect, with the goal of defining the essential elements that lead to such process dependence in QCD. This will then serve as a starting point to explore possible generalizations in a different gauge theory.
A nonlinear extension of the Caginalp phase field system is considered that takes thermal memory into account. The resulting model, which is a first-order approximation of a thermodynamically consistent system, is inspired by the theories developed by Green and Naghdi. Two equations, resulting from phase dynamics and the universal balance law for internal energy, are written in terms of the phase variable (representing a non-conserved order parameter) and the so-called thermal displacement, i.e., a primitive with respect to time of temperature. Existence and continuous dependence results are shown for weak and strong solutions to the corresponding initial-boundary value problem. Then, an optimal control problem is investigated for a suitable cost functional, in which two data act as controls, namely, the distributed heat source and the initial temperature. Fréchet differentiability between suitable Banach spaces is shown for the control-to-state operator, and meaningful first-order necessary optimality conditions are derived in terms of variational inequalities involving the adjoint variables. Eventually, characterizations of the optimal controls are given.
This paper treats a distributed optimal control problem for a tumor growth model of Cahn-Hilliard type including chemotaxis. The evolution of the tumor fraction is governed by a variational inequality corresponding to a double obstacle nonlinearity occurring in the associated potential. In addition, the control and state variables are nonlinearly coupled and, furthermore, the cost functional contains a nondifferentiable term like the $L^1$-norm in order to include sparsity effects which is of utmost relevance, especially time sparsity, in the context of cancer therapies as applying a control to the system reflects in exposing the patient to an intensive medical treatment. To cope with the difficulties originating from the variational inequality in the state system, we employ the so-called "deep quench approximation" in which the convex part of the double obstacle potential is approximated by logarithmic functions. For such functions, first-order necessary conditions of optimality can be established by invoking recent results. We use these results to derive corresponding optimality conditions also for the double obstacle case, by deducing a variational inequality in terms of the associated adjoint state variables. The resulting variational inequality can be exploited to also obtain sparsity results for the optimal controls.
A distributed optimal control problem for an extended model of phase field type for tumor growth is addressed. In this model, the chemotaxis effects are also taken into account. The control is realized by two control variables that design the dispensation of some drugs to the patient. The cost functional is of tracking type, whereas the potential setting has been kept quite general in order to allow regular and singular potentials to be considered. In this direction, some relaxation terms have been introduced in the system. We show the well-posedness of the state system, the Fréchet differentiability of the control-to-state operator in a suitable functional analytic framework, and, lastly, we characterize the first-order necessary conditions of optimality in terms of a variational inequality involving the adjoint variables.
The Cahn--Hilliard equation is one of the most common models to describe phase segregation processes in binary mixtures. In recent times, various dynamic boundary conditions have been introduced to model interactions of the materials with the boundary more precisely. To take long-range interactions of the materials into account, we propose a new model consisting of a nonlocal Cahn--Hilliard equation subject to a nonlocal dynamic boundary condition that is also of Cahn--Hilliard type and contains an additional boundary penalization term. We rigorously derive our model as the gradient flow of a nonlocal total free energy with respect to a suitable inner product of order $H^{-1}$ which contains both bulk and surface contributions. The total free energy is considered as nonlocal since it comprises convolutions in the bulk and on the surface of the phase-field variables with certain interaction kernels. The main difficulties arise from defining a suitable kernel on the surface and from handling the resulting boundary convolution. In the main model, the chemical potentials in the bulk and on the surface are coupled by a Robin type boundary condition depending on a specific relaxation parameter related to the rate of chemical reactions. We prove weak and strong well-posedness of this system, and we investigate the singular limits attained when the relaxation parameter tends to zero or infinity. By this approach, we also obtain weak and strong well-posedness of the corresponding limit systems.
This paper provides a unified mathematical analysis of a family of non-local diffuse interface models for tumor growth describing evolutions driven by long-range interactions. These integro-partial differential equations model cell-to-cell adhesion by a non-local term and may be seen as non-local variants of the corresponding local model proposed by H. Garcke et al. (2016). The model in consideration couples a non-local Cahn-Hilliard equation for the tumor phase variable with a reaction-diffusion equation for the nutrient concentration, and takes into account also significant mechanisms such as chemotaxis and active transport. The system depends on two relaxation parameters: a viscosity coefficient and parabolic-regularization coefficient on the chemical potential. The first part of the paper is devoted to the analysis of the system with both regularizations. Here, a rich spectrum of results is presented. Weak well-posedness is first addressed, also including singular potentials. Then, under suitable conditions, existence of strong solutions enjoying the separation property is proved. This allows also to obtain a refined stability estimate with respect to the data, including both chemotaxis and active transport. The second part of the paper is devoted to the study of the asymptotic behavior of the system as the relaxation parameters vanish. The asymptotics are analyzed when the parameters approach zero both separately and jointly, and exact error estimates are obtained. As a by-product, well-posedness of the corresponding limit systems is established.
In this paper, we study an optimal control problem for a macroscopic mechanical tumour model based on the phase field approach. The model couples a Cahn--Hilliard type equation to a system of linear elasticity and a reaction-diffusion equation for a nutrient concentration. By taking advantage of previous analytical well-posedness results established by the authors, we seek optimal controls in the form of a boundary nutrient supply, as well as concentrations of cytotoxic and antiangiogenic drugs that minimise a cost functional involving mechanical stresses. Special attention is given to sparsity effects, where with the inclusion of convex non-differentiable regularisation terms to the cost functional, we can infer from the first-order optimality conditions that the optimal drug concentrations can vanish on certain time intervals.
We introduce the problem of parameter identification for a coupled nonlocal Cahn-Hilliard-reaction-diffusion PDE system stemming from a recently introduced tumor growth model. The inverse problem of identifying relevant parameters is studied here by relying on techniques from optimal control theory of PDE systems. The parameters to be identified play the role of controls, and a suitable cost functional of tracking-type is introduced to account for the discrepancy between some a priori knowledge of the parameters and the controls themselves. The analysis is carried out for several classes of models, each one depending on a specific relaxation (of parabolic or viscous type) performed on the original system. First-order necessary optimality conditions are obtained on the fully relaxed system, in both the two and three-dimensional case. Then, the optimal control problem on the non-relaxed models is tackled by means of asymptotic arguments, by showing convergence of the respective adjoint systems and the minimization problems as each one of the relaxing coefficients vanishes. This allows obtaining the desired necessary optimality conditions, hence to solve the parameter identification problem, for the original PDE system in case of physically relevant double-well potentials.
We investigate the properties and structure of the recently discussed "fully inclusive jet correlator", namely, the gauge-invariant field correlator characterizing the final state hadrons produced by a free quark as this propagates in the vacuum. Working at the operator level, we connect this object to the single-hadron fragmentation correlator of a quark, and exploit a novel gauge invariant spectral decomposition technique to derive a complete set of momentum sum rules for quark fragmentation functions up to twist-3 level; known results are recovered, and new sum rules proposed. We then show how one can explicitly connect quark hadronization and dynamical quark mass generation by studying the inclusive jet's gauge-invariant mass term. This mass is, on the one hand, theoretically related to the integrated chiral-odd spectral function of the quark, and, on the other hand, is experimentally accessible through the $E$ and $\tilde{E}$ twist-3 fragmentation function sum rules. Thus, measurements of these fragmentation functions in deep inelastic processes provide one with an experimental gateway into the dynamical generation of mass in Quantum Chromodynamics.
We investigate the predictive power of transverse-momentum-dependent (TMD) distributions as a function of the light-cone momentum fraction $x$ and the hard scale $Q$ defined by the process. We apply the saddle point approximation to the unpolarized quark and gluon transverse momentum distributions and evaluate the position of the saddle point as a function of the kinematics. We determine quantitatively that the predictive power for an unpolarized transverse momentum distribution is maximal in the large-$Q$ and small-$x$ region. For cross sections the predictive power of the TMD factorization formalism is generally enhanced by considering the convolution of two distributions, and we explicitly consider the case of $Z$ and $H^0$ boson production. In the kinematic regions where the predictive power is not maximal, the distributions are sensitive to the non-perturbative hadron structure. Thus, these regions are critical for investigating hadron tomography in a three-dimensional momentum space.
A distributed optimal control problem for a diffuse interface model, which physical context is that of tumour growth dynamics, is addressed. The system we deal with comprises a Cahn--Hilliard equation for the tumour fraction coupled with a reaction-diffusion for a nutrient species surrounding the tumourous cells. The cost functional to be minimised possesses some objective terms and it also penalises long treatments time, which may affect harm to the patients, and big aggregations of tumourous cells. Hence, the optimisation problem leads to the optimal strategy which reduces the time exposure of the patient to the medication and at the same time allows the doctors to achieve suitable clinical goals.
This volume is a collection of contributions for the 7-week program "Probing Nucleons and Nuclei in High Energy Collisions" that was held at the Institute for Nuclear Theory in Seattle, WA, USA, from October 1 until November 16, 2018. The program was dedicated to the physics of the Electron Ion Collider (EIC), the world's first polarized electron-nucleon (ep) and electron-nucleus (eA) collider to be constructed in the USA. These proceedings are organized by chapters, corresponding to the weeks of the program: Week I, Generalized parton distributions; Week II, Transverse spin and TMDs; Week III, Longitudinal spin; Week IV, Symposium week; Weeks V & VI, eA collisions; Week VII, pA and AA collisions. We hope these proceedings will be useful to readers as a compilation of EIC-related science at the end of the second decade of the XXI century.
Mechanical effects have mostly been neglected so far in phase field tumour models that are based on a Cahn-Hilliard approach. In this paper we study a macroscopic mechanical model for tumour growth in which cell-cell adhesion effects are taken into account with the help of a Ginzburg--Landau type energy. In the overall model an equation of Cahn-Hilliard type is coupled to the system of linear elasticity and a reaction-diffusion equation for a nutrient concentration. The highly non-linear coupling between a fourth-order Cahn-Hilliard equation and the quasi-static elasticity system lead to new challenges which cannot be dealt within a gradient flow setting which was the method of choice for other elastic Cahn-Hilliard systems. We show existence, uniqueness and regularity results. In addition, several continuous dependence results with respect to different topologies are shown. Some of these results give uniqueness for weak solutions and other results will be helpful for optimal control problems.
We address the propagation and hadronization of a struck quark by studying the gauge invariance of the color-averaged cut quark propagator, and by relating this to the single inclusive quark fragmentation correlator by means of new sum rules. Using suitable Wilson lines, we provide a gauge-invariant definition for the mass of the color-averaged dressed quark and decompose this into the sum of a current and an interaction-dependent component. The latter, which we argue is an order parameter for dynamical chiral symmetry breaking, also appears in the sum rule for the twist-3 $\tilde{E}$ fragmentation function, providing a specific experimental way to probe the dynamical generation of mass in Quantum Chromo Dynamics.
This paper is concerned with a boundary control problem for the Cahn--Hilliard equation coupled with dynamic boundary conditions. In order to handle the control problem, we restrict our analysis to the case of regular potentials defined on the whole real line, assuming the boundary potential to be dominant. The existence of optimal control, the Fréchet differentiability of the control-to-state operator between appropriate Banach spaces, and the first-order necessary conditions for optimality are addressed. In particular, the necessary condition for optimality is characterized by a variational inequality involving the adjoint variables.
We consider a particular phase field system which physical context is that of tumor growth dynamics. The model we deal with consists of a Cahn-Hilliard type equation governing the evolution of the phase variable which takes into account the tumor cells proliferation in the tissue coupled with a reaction-diffusion equation for the nutrient. This model has already been investigated from the viewpoint of well-posedness, long time behavior, and asymptotic analyses as some parameters go to zero. Starting from these results, we aim to face a related optimal control problem by employing suitable asymptotic schemes. In this direction, further assumptions have to be required. Mainly, we ought to impose some quite general growth conditions for the involved potential and a smallness restriction for a parameter appearing in the system we are going to face. We provide existence of optimal controls and a necessary condition that an optimal control has to satisfy has been characterized as well.
A distributed optimal control problem for a phase field system which physical context is that of tumor growth is discussed. The system we are going to take into account consists of a Cahn-Hilliard equation for the phase variable (relative concentration of the tumor), coupled with a reaction-diffusion equation for the nutrient. The cost functional is of standard tracking-type and the control variable models the intensity with which it is possible to dispense a medication. The model we deal with presents two small and positive parameters which are introduced in previous contributions as relaxation terms. Here, starting from the already investigated optimal control problem for the relaxed model, we aim at confirming the existence of optimal control and characterizing the first-order optimality condition, via asymptotic schemes, when one of the two occurring parameters goes to zero.
In this work, we investigate a distributed optimal control problem for an extended phase field system of Cahn--Hilliard type which physical context is that of tumor growth dynamics. In a previous contribution, the author has already studied the corresponding problem for the logarithmic potential. Here, we try to extend the analysis by taking into account a non-smooth singular nonlinearity, namely the double obstacle potential. Due to its non-smoothness behavior, the standard procedure to characterize the necessary conditions for the optimality cannot be performed. Therefore, we follow a different strategy which in the literature is known as the "deep quench" approach in order to obtain some optimality conditions that have to be interpreted in a more general framework. We establish the existence of optimal controls and some first-order optimality conditions for the system are derived by employing suitable approximation schemes.