Weak Form of Stokes-Dirac Structures and Geometric Discretization of Port-Hamiltonian Systems

We present the mixed Galerkin discretization of distributed parameter port-Hamiltonian systems. On the prototypical example of hyperbolic systems of two conservation laws in arbitrary spatial dimension, we derive the main contributions: (i) A weak formulation of the underlying geometric (Stokes-Dirac) structure with a segmented boundary according to the causality of the boundary ports. (ii) The geometric approximation of the Stokes-Dirac structure by a finite-dimensional Dirac structure is realized using a mixed Galerkin approach and power-preserving linear maps, which define minimal discrete power variables. (iii) With a consistent approximation of the Hamiltonian, we obtain finite-dimensional port-Hamiltonian state space models. By the degrees of freedom in the power-preserving maps, the resulting family of structure-preserving schemes allows for trade-offs between centered approximations and upwinding. We illustrate the method on the example of Whitney finite elements on a 2D simplicial triangulation and compare the eigenvalue approximation in 1D with a related approach.Comment: Copyright 2018. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Short-time asymptotics of the regularizing effect for semigroups generated by quadratic operators

We study accretive quadratic operators with zero singular spaces. These degenerate non-selfadjoint differential operators are known to be hypoelliptic and to generate contraction semigroups which are smoothing in the Schwartz space for any positive time. In this work, we study the short-time asymptotics of the regularizing effect induced by these semigroups. We show that these short-time asymptotics of the regularizing effect depend on the directions of the phase space, and that this dependence can be nicely understood through the structure of the singular space. As a byproduct of these results, we derive sharp subelliptic estimates for accretive quadratic operators with zero singular spaces pointing out that the loss of derivatives with respect to the elliptic case also depends on the phase space directions according to the structure of the singular space. Some applications of these results are then given to the study of degenerate hypoelliptic Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operators and degenerate hypoelliptic Fokker-Planck operators.Comment: 46 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1411.622

Local Finite Element Approximation of Sobolev Differential Forms

We address fundamental aspects in the approximation theory of vector-valued finite element methods, using finite element exterior calculus as a unifying framework. We generalize the Cl\'ement interpolant and the Scott-Zhang interpolant to finite element differential forms, and we derive a broken Bramble-Hilbert Lemma. Our interpolants require only minimal smoothness assumptions and respect partial boundary conditions. This permits us to state local error estimates in terms of the mesh size. Our theoretical results apply to curl-conforming and divergence-conforming finite element methods over simplicial triangulations.Comment: 22 pages. Comments welcom

Symplectic Techniques for Semiclassical Completely Integrable Systems

This article is a survey of classical and quantum completely integrable systems from the viewpoint of local ``phase space'' analysis. It advocates the use of normal forms and shows how to get global information from glueing local pieces. Many crucial phenomena such as monodromy or eigenvalue concentration are shown to arise from the presence of non-degenerate critical points.Comment: 32 pages, 7 figures. Review articl

p-Adic Mathematical Physics

A brief review of some selected topics in p-adic mathematical physics is presented.Comment: 36 page

Isometric Immersions and the Waving of Flags

In this article we propose a novel geometric model to study the motion of a physical flag. In our approach a flag is viewed as an isometric immersion from the square with values into $\mathbb R^3$ satisfying certain boundary conditions at the flag pole. Under additional regularity constraints we show that the space of all such flags carries the structure of an infinite dimensional manifold and can be viewed as a submanifold of the space of all immersions. The submanifold result is then used to derive the equations of motion, after equipping the space of isometric immersions with its natural kinetic energy. This approach can be viewed in a similar spirit as Arnold's geometric picture for the motion of an incompressible fluid.Comment: 25 pages, 1 figur