arXiv subjects

Hermen Jan Hupkes

Publications and source records attributed to Hermen Jan Hupkes.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Microscopic Variability Alters Macroscopic Rotation Speed in Stochastic Spiral Waves

We present a general theory for noise-induced corrections to the angular velocity of spiral waves. Stochasticity produces two second-order effects: an instantaneous term from heterogeneity that always slows rotation, and an orbital-drift term from temporal fluctuations that can either accelerate or decelerate it. For our parameters, orbital drift is weaker, producing a net slowdown. Analytical predictions match Barkley-model simulations with temporal noise. Examination of additional noise types in silico confirms angular velocity slowing. This mechanism provides a robust route by which stochasticity reshapes spiral dynamics in excitable media, with direct implications for arrhythmias and neural wave propagation.

nlin.PS↗

arXiv2025

Radiating Solitary Waves in an FPUT Lattice with Random Coefficients

We study the propagation of solitary waves in a Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou (FPUT) lattice with small random heterogeneity in the linear spring force. Perturbed by the random environment, solitary waves lose energy through a radiative tail, resulting in gradual amplitude attenuation. As long as the wave remains coherent, we track its position and amplitude via a modulation approach. An expansion of the resulting modulation equations provides explicit predictions for the slow average amplitude decay, which we verify through numerical simulations.

math.DS↗

arXiv2025

Stability of Stochastically Forced Solitons in the Korteweg-de Vries Equation

We study the stability and dynamics of solitons in the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation in the presence of noise and deterministic forcing. The noise is space-dependent and statistically translation-invariant. We show that, for small forcing, solitons remain close to the family of traveling waves in a weighted Sobolev norm, with high probability. We study the effective dynamics of the soliton amplitude and position via their variational phase, for which we derive explicit modulation equations. The stability result holds on a time scale where the deterministic forcing induces significant amplitude modulation.

math.AP↗

arXiv2025

Local Phase Tracking and Metastability of Planar Waves in Stochastic Reaction-Diffusion Systems

Planar travelling waves on $\mathbb R^d,$ with $ d\geq 2,$ are shown to persist in systems of reaction-diffusion equations with multiplicative noise on significantly long timescales with high probability, provided that the wave is orbitally stable in dimension one ($d=1$). While a global phase tracking mechanism is required to determine the location of the stochastically perturbed wave in one dimension, or on a cylindrical domain, we show that the travelling wave on the full unbounded space can be controlled by keeping track of local deviations only. In particular, the energy infinitesimally added to or withdrawn from the system by noise dissipates almost fully into the transverse direction, leaving behind small localised phase shifts. The noise process considered is white in time and coloured in space, possibly weighted, and either translation invariant or trace class.

math.AP↗

arXiv2025

Conditional Speed and Shape Corrections for Travelling Wave Solutions to Stochastically Perturbed Reaction-Diffusion Systems

In this work we perform rigorous small noise expansions to study the impact of stochastic forcing on the behaviour of planar travelling wave solutions to reaction-diffusion equations on cylindrical domains. In particular, we use a stochastic freezing approach that allows effective limiting information to be extracted concerning the behaviour of the stochastic perturbations from the deterministic wave. As an application, this allows us to provide a rigorous definition for the stochastic corrections to the wave speed. In addition, our approach allows their size to be computed to any desired order in the noise strength, provided that sufficient smoothness is available.

math.AP↗

arXiv2025

Soliton Amplification in the Korteweg-de Vries Equation by Multiplicative Forcing

We study the stability and dynamics of solitons in the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation with small multiplicative forcing. Forcing breaks the conservative structure of the KdV equation, leading to substantial changes in energy over long times. We show that, for small forcing, the inserted energy is almost fully absorbed by the soliton, resulting in a drastically changed amplitude and velocity. We decompose the solution to the forced equation into a modulated soliton and an infinite dimensional perturbation. Assuming slow exponential decay of the forcing, we show that the perturbation decays at the same exponential rate in a weighted Sobolev norm centered around the soliton.

math.AP↗

arXiv2024

Small-amplitude periodic traveling waves in dimer Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou lattices

We prove the existence of small-amplitude periodic traveling waves in dimer Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou (FPUT) lattices without assumptions of physical symmetry. Such lattices are infinite, one-dimensional chains of coupled particles in which the particle masses and/or the potentials of the coupling springs can alternate. Previously, periodic traveling waves were constructed in a variety of limiting regimes for the symmetric mass and spring dimers, in which only one kind of material data alternates. The new results discussed here remove the symmetry assumptions by exploiting the gradient structure and translation invariance of the traveling wave problem. Together, these features eliminate certain solvability conditions that symmetry would otherwise manage and facilitate a bifurcation argument involving a two-dimensional kernel.

math.DS↗

arXiv2024

Existence of monostable fronts for a KPP infinite-difference numerical scheme

We study the existence of traveling wave solutions for a numerical counterpart of the KPP equation. We obtain the existence of monostable fronts for all super-critical speeds in the regime where the spatial step size is small. The key strategy is to transfer the invertibility of certain linear operators related to the front solutions from the continuous setting to the discrete case we are interested in. We rely on resolvent bounds which are uniform with respect to the step size, a procedure which is also known as spectral convergence. The approach is also able to handle infinite range discretizations with geometrically decaying coefficients that are allowed to have both signs, which prevents the use of the comparison principle.

math.NA↗

arXiv2024

Multidimensional Stability of Planar Travelling Waves for Stochastically Perturbed Reaction-Diffusion Systems

We consider reaction-diffusion systems with multiplicative noise on a spatial domain of dimension two or higher. The noise process is white in time, coloured in space, and invariant under translations. In the deterministic setting, multidimensional stability of planar waves on the whole space $\mathbb R^d$ has been studied by many. Inspired by previous works on the real line, we establish the multidimensional stability of planar waves on a cylindrical domain on time scales that are exponentially long with respect to the noise strength. This is achieved by means of a stochastic phase tracking mechanism that can be maintained over such long time scales. The corresponding mild formulation of our problem features stochastic integrals with respect to anticipating integrands, which hence cannot be understood within the well-established setting of Itô-integrals. To circumvent this problem, we exploit and extend recently developed theory concerning forward integrals.

math.AP↗

arXiv2024

Long-Timescale Soliton Dynamics in the Korteweg-de Vries Equation with Multiplicative Translation-Invariant Noise

This paper studies the behavior of solitons in the Korteweg-de Vries equation under the influence of multiplicative noise. We introduce stochastic processes that track the amplitude and position of solitons based on a rescaled frame formulation and stability properties of the soliton family. We furthermore construct tractable approximations to the stochastic soliton amplitude and position which reveal their leading-order drift. We find that the statistical properties predicted by our method agree well with numerical evidence.

math.AP↗

arXiv2024

Propagation reversal on trees in the large diffusion regime

In this work we study travelling wave solutions to bistable reaction diffusion equations on bi-infinite $k$-ary trees in the continuum regime where the diffusion parameter is large. Adapting the spectral convergence method developed by Bates and his coworkers, we find an asymptotic prediction for the speed of travelling front solutions. In addition, we prove that the associated profiles converge to the solutions of a suitable limiting reaction-diffusion PDE. Finally, for the standard cubic nonlinearity we provide explicit formula's to bound the thin region in parameter space where the propagation direction undergoes a reversal.

math.AP↗

arXiv2022

Mass and spring dimer Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou nanopterons with exponentially small, nonvanishing ripples

We study traveling waves in mass and spring dimer Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou (FPUT) lattices in the long wave limit. Such lattices are known to possess nanopteron traveling waves in relative displacement coordinates. These nanopteron profiles consist of the superposition of an exponentially localized "core," which is close to a KdV solitary wave, and a periodic "ripple," whose amplitude is small beyond all algebraic orders of the long wave parameter, although a zero amplitude is not precluded. Here we deploy techniques of spatial dynamics, inspired by results of Iooss and Kirchgässner, Iooss and James, and Venney and Zimmer, to construct mass and spring dimer nanopterons whose ripples are both exponentially small and also nonvanishing. We first obtain "growing front" traveling waves in the original position coordinates and then pass to relative displacement. To study position, we recast its traveling wave problem as a first-order equation on an infinite-dimensional Banach space; then we develop hypotheses that, when met, allow us to reduce such a first-order problem to one solved by Lombardi. A key part of our analysis is then the passage back from the reduced problem to the original one. Our hypotheses free us from working strictly with lattices but are easily checked for FPUT mass and spring dimers. We also give a detailed exposition and reinterpretation of Lombardi's methods, to illustrate how our hypotheses work in concert with his techniques, and we provide a dialogue with prior methods of constructing FPUT nanopterons, to expose similarities and differences with the present approach.

math.AP↗

arXiv2022

Propagation reversal for bistable differential equations on trees

We study traveling wave solutions to bistable differential equations on infinite $k$-ary trees. These graphs generalize the notion of classical square infinite lattices and our results complement those for bistable lattice equations on $\mathbb{Z}$. Using comparison principles and explicit lower and upper solutions, we show that wave-solutions are pinned for small diffusion parameters. Upon increasing the diffusion, the wave starts to travel with non-zero speed, in a direction that depends on the detuning parameter. However, once the diffusion is sufficiently strong, the wave propagates in a single direction up the tree irrespective of the detuning parameter. In particular, our results imply that changes to the diffusion parameter can lead to a reversal of the propagation direction.

math.DS↗

arXiv2022

Scaling Relations for Auxin Waves

We analyze an 'up-the-gradient' model for the formation of transport channels of the phytohormone auxin, through auxin-mediated polarization of the PIN1 auxin transporter. We show that this model admits a family of travelling wave solutions that is parameterized by the height of the auxin-pulse. We uncover scaling relations for the speed and width of these waves and verify these rigorous results with numerical computations. In addition, we provide explicit expressions for the leading-order wave profiles, which allows the influence of the biological parameters in the problem to be readily identified. Our proofs are based on a generalization of the scaling principle developed by Friesecke and Pego to construct pulse solutions to the classic Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou model, which describes a one-dimensional chain of coupled nonlinear springs.

math.AP↗

arXiv2022

SparseAlign: A Super-Resolution Algorithm for Automatic Marker Localization and Deformation Estimation in Cryo-Electron Tomography

Tilt-series alignment is crucial to obtaining high-resolution reconstructions in cryo-electron tomography. Beam-induced local deformation of the sample is hard to estimate from the low-contrast sample alone, and often requires fiducial gold bead markers. The state-of-the-art approach for deformation estimation uses (semi-)manually labelled marker locations in projection data to fit the parameters of a polynomial deformation model. Manually-labelled marker locations are difficult to obtain when data are noisy or markers overlap in projection data. We propose an alternative mathematical approach for simultaneous marker localization and deformation estimation by extending a grid-free super-resolution algorithm first proposed in the context of single-molecule localization microscopy. Our approach does not require labelled marker locations; instead, we use an image-based loss where we compare the forward projection of markers with the observed data. We equip this marker localization scheme with an additional deformation estimation component and solve for a reduced number of deformation parameters. Using extensive numerical studies on marker-only samples, we show that our approach automatically finds markers and reliably estimates sample deformation without labelled marker data. We further demonstrate the applicability of our approach for a broad range of model mismatch scenarios, including experimental electron tomography data of gold markers on ice.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2021

Curvature-driven front propagation through planar lattices in oblique directions

In this paper we investigate the long-term behaviour of solutions to the discrete Allen-Cahn equation posed on a two-dimensional lattice. We show that front-like initial conditions evolve towards a planar travelling wave modulated by a phaseshift $γ_l(t)$ that depends on the coordinate $l$ transverse to the primary direction of propagation. This direction is allowed to be general, but rational, generalizing earlier known results for the horizontal direction. We show that the behaviour of $γ$ can be asymptotically linked to the behaviour of a suitably discretized mean curvature flow. This allows us to show that travelling waves propagating in rational directions are nonlinearly stable with respect to perturbations that are asymptotically periodic in the transverse direction.

math.DS↗

arXiv2020

Travelling wave solutions for fully discrete FitzHugh-Nagumo type equations with infinite-range interactions

We investigate the impact of spatial-temporal discretisation schemes on the dynamics of a class of reaction-diffusion equations that includes the FitzHugh-Nagumo system. For the temporal discretisation we consider the family of six backward differential formula (BDF) methods, which includes the well-known backward-Euler scheme. The spatial discretisations can feature infinite-range interactions, allowing us to consider neural field models. We construct travelling wave solutions to these fully discrete systems in the small time-step limit by viewing them as singular perturbations of the corresponding spatially discrete system. In particular, we refine the previous approach by Hupkes and Van Vleck for scalar fully discretised systems, which is based on a spectral convergence technique that was developed by Bates, Chen and Chmaj.

math.DS↗

arXiv2020

Micropterons, Nanopterons and Solitary Wave Solutions to the Diatomic Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou Problem

We use a specialized boundary-value problem solver for mixed-type functional differential equations to numerically examine the landscape of traveling wave solutions to the diatomic Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou (FPUT) problem. By using a continuation approach, we are able to uncover the relationship between the branches of micropterons and nanopterons that have been rigorously constructed recently in various limiting regimes. We show that the associated surfaces are connected together in a nontrivial fashion and illustrate the key role that solitary waves play in the branch points. Finally, we numerically show that the diatomic solitary waves are stable under the full dynamics of the FPUT system.

math.AP↗