arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Y. Brenier.
We consider nondecreasing entropy solutions to 1-d scalar conservation laws and show that the spatial derivatives of such solutions satisfy a contraction property with respect to the Wasserstein distance of any order. This result extends the L^1-contraction property shown by Kruzkov.
We show that the deterministic past history of the Universe can be uniquely reconstructed from the knowledge of the present mass density field, the latter being inferred from the 3D distribution of luminous matter, assumed to be tracing the distribution of dark matter up to a known bias. Reconstruction ceases to be unique below those scales -- a few Mpc -- where multi-streaming becomes significant. Above 6 Mpc/h we propose and implement an effective Monge-Ampere-Kantorovich method of unique reconstruction. At such scales the Zel'dovich approximation is well satisfied and reconstruction becomes an instance of optimal mass transportation, a problem which goes back to Monge (1781). After discretization into N point masses one obtains an assignment problem that can be handled by effective algorithms with not more than cubic time complexity in N and reasonable CPU time requirements. Testing against N-body cosmological simulations gives over 60% of exactly reconstructed points. We apply several interrelated tools from optimization theory that were not used in cosmological reconstruction before, such as the Monge-Ampere equation, its relation to the mass transportation problem, the Kantorovich duality and the auction algorithm for optimal assignment. Self-contained discussion of relevant notions and techniques is provided.
The KdV equation can be considered as a special case of the general equation u_{t} + f(u)_{x} - \delta g(u_{xx})_x = 0, \qquad \delta > 0, where f is non-linear and g is linear, namely $f(u)=u^2/2$ and g(v)=v. As the parameter $\delta$ tends to 0, the dispersive behavior of the KdV equation has been throughly investigated . We show through numerical evidence that a completely different, dissipative behavior occurs when g is non-linear, namely when g is an even concave function such as $g(v)=-|v|$ or $g(v)=-v^2$. In particular, our numerical results hint that as $\delta -> 0$ the solutions converge to the unique entropy solution of the formal limit equation, in total contrast with the solutions of the KdV equation.