arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Didier Smets.
A simple Markov process is considered involving a diffusion in one direction and a transport in a transverse direction. Quantitative mixing rate estimates are obtained with limited assumptions about the transport field, which might be highly irregular and/or highly degenerate, in particular quite far from satisfying an hypoellipticity type assumption.
As a sequel to our previous analysis in [9] arXiv:2202.09411 on the Gross-Pitaevskii equation on the product space $\mathbb{R} \times \mathbb{T}$, we construct a branch of finite energy travelling waves as minimizers of the Ginzburg-Landau energy at fixed momentum. We deduce that minimizers are precisely the planar dark solitons when the length of the transverse direction is less than a critical value, and that they are genuinely two-dimensional solutions otherwise. The proof of the existence of minimizers is based on the compactness of minimizing sequences, relying on a new symmetrization argument that is well-suited to the periodic setting.
To study the temperature in a gas subjected to electromagnetic radiations, one may use the Radiative Transfer equations coupled with the Navier-Stokes equations. The problem has 7 dimensions; however with minimal simplifications it is equivalent to a small number of integro-differential equations in 3 dimensions. We present the method and a numerical implementation using an H-matrix compression scheme. The result is a very fast: 50K physical points, all directions of radiation and 680 frequencies require less than 5 minutes on an Apple M1 Laptop. The method is capable of handling variable absorptioN and scattering functionS of spatial positions and frequencies. The implementation is done using htool, a matrix compression library interfaced with the PDE solver freefem++. Applications to the temperature in the French Chamonix valley is presented at different hours of the day with and without snow / clouds and with a variable absorption taken from the Gemini measurements. The result is precise enough to assert temperature differences due to increased absorption in the vibrational frequency subrange of greenhouse gasses.
We study the Gross-Pitaevskii equation in dimension two with periodic conditions in one direction, or equivalently on the product space $\mathbb{R} \times \mathbb{T}_L$ where $L > 0$ and $\mathbb{T}_L = \mathbb{R} / L \mathbb{Z}.$ We focus on the variational problem consisting in minimizing the Ginzburg-Landau energy under a fixed momentum constraint. We prove that there exists a threshold value for $L$ below which minimizers are the one-dimensional dark solitons, and above which no minimizer can be one-dimensional.
We introduce a functional framework taylored to investigate the minimality and stability properties of the Ginzburg-Landau vortex of degree one on the whole plane. We prove that a renormalized Ginzburg-Landau energy is well-defined in that framework and that the vortex is its unique global minimizer up to the invariances by translation and phase shift. Our main result is a nonlinear coercivity estimate for the renormalized energy around the vortex, from which we can deduce its orbital stability as a solution to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, the natural Hamiltonian evolution equation associated to the Ginzburg-Landau energy.
We provide a variational construction of special solutions to the generalized surface quasi-geostrophic equations. These solutions take the form of N vortex patches with N-fold symmetry , which are steady in a uniformly rotating frame. Moreover, we investigate their asymptotic properties when the size of the corresponding patches vanishes. In this limit, we prove these solutions to be a desingularization of N Dirac masses with the same intensity, located on the N vertices of a regular polygon rotating at a constant angular velocity.
This article is devoted to the study of the Hele-Shaw equation. We introduce an approach inspired by the water-wave theory. Starting from a reduction to the boundary, introducing the Dirichlet to Neumann operator and exploiting various cancellations, we exhibit parabolic evolution equations for the horizontal and vertical traces of the velocity on the free surface. This allows to quasi-linearize the equations in a very simple way. By combining these exact identities with convexity inequalities, we prove the existence of hidden Lyapunov functions of different natures. We also deduce from these identities and previous works on the water wave problem a simple proof of the well-posedness of the Cauchy problem. The analysis contains two side results of independent interest. Firstly, we give a principle to derive estimates for the modulus of continuity of a PDE under general assumptions on the flow. Secondly we prove a convexity inequality for the Dirichlet to Neumann operator.
We investigate the linear stability of inviscid columnar vortices with respect to finite energy perturbations. For a large class of vortex profiles, we show that the linearized evolution group has a sub-exponential growth in time, which means that the associated growth bound is equal to zero. This implies in particular that the spectrum of the linearized operator is entirely contained in the imaginary axis. This contribution complements the results of a previous work, where spectral stability was established for the linearized operator in the enstrophy space.
Columnar vortices are stationary solutions of the three-dimensional Euler equations with axial symmetry, where the velocity field only depends on the distance to the axis and has no component in the axial direction. Stability of such flows was first investigated by Lord Kelvin in 1880, but despite a long history the only analytical results available so far provide necessary conditions for instability under either planar or axisymmetric perturbations. The purpose of this paper is to show that columnar vortices are spectrally stable with respect to three-dimensional perturbations with no particular symmetry. Our result applies to a large family of velocity profiles, including the most common models in atmospheric flows and engineering applications. The proof is based on a homotopy argument, which allows us to concentrate in the spectral analysis of the linearized operator to a small neighborhood of the imaginary axis, where unstable eigenvalues can be excluded using integral identities and a careful study of the so-called critical layers.
We construct families of smooth travelling-wave solutions to the inviscid surface quasi-geostrophic equation (SQG). These solutions can be viewed as the equivalents for this equation of the vortex anti-vortex pairs in the context of the incompressible Euler equation. Our argument relies on the stream function formulation and eventually amounts to solving a fractional nonlinear elliptic equation by variational methods.
Leapfrogging motion of vortex rings sharing the same axis of symmetry was first predicted by Helmholtz in his famous work on the Euler equation for incompressible fluids. Its justification in that framework remains an open question to date. In this paper, we rigorously derive the corresponding leapfrogging motion for the axially symmetric three-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation.
We derive a precise motion law for fronts of solutions to scalar one-dimensional reaction-diffusion equations with equal depth multiple-wells, in the case the second derivative of the potential vanishes at its minimizers. We show that, renormalizing time in an algebraic way, the motion of fronts is governed by a simple system of ordinary differential equations of nearest neighbor interaction type. These interactions may be either attractive or repulsive. Our results are not constrained by the possible occurrence of collisions nor splittings. They present substantial differences with the results obtained in the case the second derivative does not vanish at the wells, a case which has been extensively studied in the literature, and where fronts have been showed to move at exponentially small speed, with motion laws which are not renormalizable.
We pursue our work on the dynamical stability of dark solitons for the one-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation. In this paper, we prove their asymptotic stability under small perturbations in the energy space. In particular, our results do not require smallness in some weighted spaces or a priori spectral assumptions. Our strategy is reminiscent of the one used by Martel and Merle in various works regarding generalized Korteweg-de Vries equations. The important feature of our contribution is related to the fact that while Korteweg-de Vries equations possess unidirectional dispersion, Schrödinger equations do not.
We derive the asymptotical dynamical law for Ginzburg-Landau vortices in an inhomogeneous background density under the Schrödinger dynamics, when the Ginzburg-Landau parameter goes to zero. New ingredients involve across the cores lower bound estimates and approximations.
We establish the stability in the energy space for sums of solitons of the one-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation when their speeds are mutually distinct and distinct from zero, and when the solitons are initially well-separated and spatially ordered according to their speeds.
We propose a weak formulation for the binormal curvature flow of curves in $\R^3.$ This formulation is sufficiently broad to consider integral currents as initial data, and sufficiently strong for the weak-strong uniqueness property to hold, as long as self-intersections do not occur. We also prove a global existence theorem in that framework.
We prove an estimate for the difference of two solutions of the Schrödinger map equation for maps from $T^1$ to $S^2.$ This estimate yields some continuity properties of the flow map for the topology of $L^2(T^1,S^2)$, provided one takes its quotient by the continuous group action of $T^1$ given by translations. We also prove that without taking this quotient, for any $t>0$ the flow map at time $t$ is discontinuous as a map from $\mathcal{C}^\infty(T^1,S^2)$, equipped with the weak topology of $H^{1/2},$ to the space of distributions $(\mathcal{C}^\infty(T^1,\R^3))^*.$
In this paper, we proceed along our analysis of the Korteweg-de Vries approximation of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation initiated in a previous paper. At the long-wave limit, we establish that solutions of small amplitude to the one-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation split into two waves with opposite constant speeds $\pm \sqrt{2}$, each of which are solutions to a Korteweg-de Vries equation. We also compute an estimate of the error term which is somewhat optimal as long as travelling waves are considered. At the cost of higher regularity of the initial data, this improves our previous estimate.