Linear growth of streaming instability in pressure bumps

Streaming instability is a powerful mechanism which concentrates dust grains in pro- toplanetary discs, eventually up to the stage where they collapse gravitationally and form planetesimals. Previous studies inferred that it should be ineffective in viscous discs, too efficient in inviscid discs, and may not operate in local pressure maxima where solids accumulate. From a linear analysis of stability, we show that streaming instability behaves differently inside local pressure maxima. Under the action of the strong differential advection imposed by the bump, a novel unstable mode develops and grows even when gas viscosity is large. Hence, pressure bumps are found to be the only places where streaming instability occurs in viscous discs. This offers a promising way to conciliate models of planet formation with recent observations of young discs.Comment: 11 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Free energy and complexity of spherical bipartite models

We investigate both free energy and complexity of the spherical bipartite spin glass model. We first prove a variational formula in high temperature for the limiting free energy based on the well-known Crisanti-Sommers representation of the mixed p-spin spherical model. Next, we show that the mean number of local minima at low levels of energy is exponentially large in the size of the system and we derive a bound on the location of the ground state energy.Comment: 22 page

Limiting geodesics for first-passage percolation on subsets of Z2\mathbb{Z}^2

It is an open problem to show that in two-dimensional first-passage percolation, the sequence of finite geodesics from any point to $(n,0)$ has a limit in $n$. In this paper, we consider this question for first-passage percolation on a wide class of subgraphs of $\mathbb {Z}^2$: those whose vertex set is infinite and connected with an infinite connected complement. This includes, for instance, slit planes, half-planes and sectors. Writing $x_n$ for the sequence of boundary vertices, we show that the sequence of geodesics from any point to $x_n$ has an almost sure limit assuming only existence of finite geodesics. For all passage-time configurations, we show existence of a limiting Busemann function. Specializing to the case of the half-plane, we prove that the limiting geodesic graph has one topological end; that is, all its infinite geodesics coalesce, and there are no backward infinite paths. To do this, we prove in the Appendix existence of geodesics for all product measures in our domains and remove the moment assumption of the Wehr-Woo theorem on absence of bigeodesics in the half-plane.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AAP999 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org