Numerical study of a multiscale expansion of KdV and Camassa-Holm equation

We study numerically solutions to the Korteweg-de Vries and Camassa-Holm equation close to the breakup of the corresponding solution to the dispersionless equation. The solutions are compared with the properly rescaled numerical solution to a fourth order ordinary differential equation, the second member of the Painlev\'e I hierarchy. It is shown that this solution gives a valid asymptotic description of the solutions close to breakup. We present a detailed analysis of the situation and compare the Korteweg-de Vries solution quantitatively with asymptotic solutions obtained via the solution of the Hopf and the Whitham equations. We give a qualitative analysis for the Camassa-Holm equationComment: 17 pages, 13 figure

Concentration around the mean for maxima of empirical processes

In this paper we give optimal constants in Talagrand's concentration inequalities for maxima of empirical processes associated to independent and eventually nonidentically distributed random variables. Our approach is based on the entropy method introduced by Ledoux.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009117905000000044 in the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The polymer mat: Arrested rebound of a compressed polymer layer

Compression of an adsorbed polymer layer distorts its relaxed structure. Surface force measurements from different laboratories show that the return to this relaxed structure after the compression is released can be slowed to the scale of tens of minutes and that the recovery time grows rapidly with molecular weight. We argue that the arrested state of the free layer before relaxation can be described as a Guiselin brush structure1, in which the surface excess lies at heights of the order of the layer thickness, unlike an adsorbed layer. This brush structure predicts an exponential falloff of the force at large distance with a decay length that varies as the initial compression distance to the 6/5 power. This exponential falloff is consistent with surface force measurements. We propose a relaxation mechanism that accounts for the increase in relaxation time with chain length.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figre

A study of the factors of mimicry.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Thermodynamics and quark susceptibilities: a Monte-Carlo approach to the PNJL model

The Monte-Carlo method is applied to the Polyakov-loop extended Nambu--Jona-Lasinio (PNJL) model. This leads beyond the saddle-point approximation in a mean-field calculation and introduces fluctuations around the mean fields. We study the impact of fluctuations on the thermodynamics of the model, both in the case of pure gauge theory and including two quark flavors. In the two-flavor case, we calculate the second-order Taylor expansion coefficients of the thermodynamic grand canonical partition function with respect to the quark chemical potential and present a comparison with extrapolations from lattice QCD. We show that the introduction of fluctuations produces only small changes in the behavior of the order parameters for chiral symmetry restoration and the deconfinement transition. On the other hand, we find that fluctuations are necessary in order to reproduce lattice data for the flavor non-diagonal quark susceptibilities. Of particular importance are pion fields, the contribution of which is strictly zero in the saddle point approximation