182 research outputs found
Ehrenfest regularization of Hamiltonian systems
Imagine a freely rotating rigid body. The body has three principal axes of
rotation. It follows from mathematical analysis of the evolution equations that
pure rotations around the major and minor axes are stable while rotation around
the middle axis is unstable. However, only rotation around the major axis (with
highest moment of inertia) is stable in physical reality (as demonstrated by
the unexpected change of rotation of the Explorer 1 probe). We propose a
general method of Ehrenfest regularization of Hamiltonian equations by which
the reversible Hamiltonian equations are equipped with irreversible terms
constructed from the Hamiltonian dynamics itself. The method is demonstrated on
harmonic oscillator, rigid body motion (solving the problem of stable minor
axis rotation), ideal fluid mechanics and kinetic theory. In particular, the
regularization can be seen as a birth of irreversibility and dissipation. In
addition, we discuss and propose discretizations of the Ehrenfest regularized
evolution equations such that key model characteristics (behavior of energy and
entropy) are valid in the numerical scheme as well
Long-time behavior of a finite volume discretization for a fourth order diffusion equation
We consider a non-standard finite-volume discretization of a strongly
non-linear fourth order diffusion equation on the -dimensional cube, for
arbitrary . The scheme preserves two important structural properties
of the equation: the first is the interpretation as a gradient flow in a mass
transportation metric, and the second is an intimate relation to a linear
Fokker-Planck equation. Thanks to these structural properties, the scheme
possesses two discrete Lyapunov functionals. These functionals approximate the
entropy and the Fisher information, respectively, and their dissipation rates
converge to the optimal ones in the discrete-to-continuous limit. Using the
dissipation, we derive estimates on the long-time asymptotics of the discrete
solutions. Finally, we present results from numerical experiments which
indicate that our discretization is able to capture significant features of the
complex original dynamics, even with a rather coarse spatial resolution.Comment: 27 pages, minor change
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