The ground state of a Gross–Pitaevskii energy with general potential in the Thomas–Fermi limit

We study the ground state which minimizes a Gross–Pitaevskii energy with general non-radial trapping potential, under the unit mass constraint, in the Thomas–Fermi limit where a small parameter tends to 0. This ground state plays an important role in the mathematical treatment of recent experiments on the phenomenon of Bose–Einstein condensation, and in the study of various types of solutions of nonhomogeneous defocusing nonlinear Schrodinger equations. Many of these applications require delicate estimates for the behavior of the ground state near the boundary of the condensate, as the singular parameter tends to zero, in the vicinity of which the ground state has irregular behavior in the form of a steep corner layer. In particular, the role of this layer is important in order to detect the presence of vortices in the small density region of the condensate, understand the superfluid flow around an obstacle, and also has a leading order contribution in the energy. In contrast to previous approaches, we utilize a perturbation argument to go beyond the classical Thomas–Fermi approximation and accurately approximate the layer by the Hastings–McLeod solution of the Painleve–II equation. This settles an open problem, answered very recently only for the special case of the model harmonic potential. In fact, we even improve upon previous results that relied heavily on the radial symmetry of the potential trap. Moreover, we show that the ground state has the maximal regularity available, namely it remains uniformly bounded in the 1/2-Holder norm, which is the exact Holder regularity of the singular limit profile, as the singular parameter tends to zero. Our study is highly motivated by an interesting open problem posed recently by Aftalion, Jerrard, and Royo-Letelier, and an open question of Gallo and Pelinovsky, concerning the removal of the radial symmetry assumption from the potential trap

Global-in-time behavior of the solution to a Gierer-Meinhardt system

Gierer-Meinhardt system is a mathematical model to describe biological pattern formation due to activator and inhibitor. Turing pattern is expected in the presence of local self-enhancement and long-range inhibition. The long-time behavior of the solution, however, has not yet been clarified mathematically. In this paper, we study the case when its ODE part takes periodic-in-time solutions, that is, $\tau=s+1$. Under some additional assumptions on parameters, we show that the solution exists global-in-time and absorbed into one of these ODE orbits. Thus spatial patterns eventually dis- appear if those parameters are in a region without local self-enhancement or long-range inhibition

Motion of a droplet for the mass-conserving stochastic Allen-Cahn equation

We study the stochastic mass-conserving Allen-Cahn equation posed on a bounded two-dimensional domain with additive spatially smooth space-time noise. This equation associated with a small positive parameter describes the stochastic motion of a small almost semicircular droplet attached to domain's boundary and moving towards a point of locally maximum curvature. We apply It\^o calculus to derive the stochastic dynamics of the droplet by utilizing the approximately invariant manifold introduced by Alikakos, Chen and Fusco for the deterministic problem. In the stochastic case depending on the scaling, the motion is driven by the change in the curvature of the boundary and the stochastic forcing. Moreover, under the assumption of a sufficiently small noise strength, we establish stochastic stability of a neighborhood of the manifold of droplets in $L^2$ and $H^1$, which means that with overwhelming probability the solution stays close to the manifold for very long time-scales

Layer dynamics for the one dimensional ε-dependent Cahn–Hilliard/Allen–Cahn equation

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00526-021-02085-4We study the dynamics of the one-dimensional ε-dependent Cahn-Hilliard / Allen-Cahn equation within a neighborhood of an equilibrium of N transition layers, that in general does not conserve mass. Two different settings are considered which differ in that, for the second, we impose a mass-conservation constraint in place of one of the zero-mass flux boundary conditions at x = 1. Motivated by the study of Carr and Pego on the layered metastable patterns of Allen-Cahn in [10], and by this of Bates and Xun in [5] for the Cahn-Hilliard equation, we implement an N-dimensional, and a mass-conservative N−1-dimensional manifold respectively; therein, a metastable state with N transition layers is approximated. We then determine, for both cases, the essential dynamics of the layers (ode systems with the equations of motion), expressed in terms of local coordinates relative to the manifold used. In particular, we estimate the spectrum of the linearized Cahn-Hilliard / Allen-Cahn operator, and specify wide families of ε-dependent weights δ(ε), µ(ε), acting at each part of the operator, for which the dynamics are stable and rest exponentially small in ε. Our analysis enlightens the role of mass conservation in the classification of the general mixed problem into two main categories where the solution has a profile close to Allen-Cahn, or, when the mass is conserved, close to the Cahn-Hilliard solution

Crank-Nicolson finite element discretizations for a two-dimenional linear Schroedinger-type equation posed in noncylindrical domain

First published in Mathematics of Computation online 2014 (84 (2015), 1571-1598), published by the American Mathematical SocietyMotivated by the paraxial narrow–angle approximation of the Helmholtz equation in domains of variable topography, we consider an initialand boundary-value problem for a general Schr¨odinger-type equation posed on a two space-dimensional noncylindrical domain with mixed boundary conditions. The problem is transformed into an equivalent one posed on a rectangular domain, and we approximate its solution by a Crank–Nicolson finite element method. For the proposed numerical method, we derive an optimal order error estimate in the L2 norm, and to support the error analysis we prove a global elliptic regularity theorem for complex elliptic boundary value problems with mixed boundary conditions. Results from numerical experiments are presented which verify the optimal order of convergence of the method