Ricci flow coupled with harmonic map flow

We investigate a new geometric flow which consists of a coupled system of the Ricci flow on a closed manifold M with the harmonic map flow of a map phi from M to some closed target manifold N with a (possibly time-dependent) positive coupling constant alpha. This system can be interpreted as the gradient flow of an energy functional F_alpha which is a modification of Perelman's energy F for the Ricci flow, including the Dirichlet energy for the map phi. Surprisingly, the coupled system may be less singular than the Ricci flow or the harmonic map flow alone. In particular, we can always rule out energy concentration of phi a-priori - without any assumptions on the curvature of the target manifold N - by choosing alpha large enough. Moreover, if alpha is bounded away from zero it suffices to bound the curvature of (M,g(t)) to also obtain control of phi and all its derivatives - a result which is clearly not true for alpha = 0. Besides these new phenomena, the flow shares many good properties with the Ricci flow. In particular, we can derive the monotonicity of an entropy functional W_alpha similar to Perelman's Ricci flow entropy W and of so-called reduced volume functionals. We then apply these monotonicity results to rule out non-trivial breathers and geometric collapsing at finite times.Comment: 41 pages, shortened and references updated, final version, to appear in Ann. Sci. \'Ec. Norm. Sup\'e

The Cooling Flow to Accretion Flow Transition

Cooling flows in galaxy clusters and isolated elliptical galaxies are a source of mass for fueling accretion onto a central supermassive black hole. We calculate the dynamics of accreting matter in the combined gravitational potential of a host galaxy and a central black hole assuming a steady state, spherically symmetric flow (i.e., no angular momentum). The global dynamics depends primarily on the accretion rate. For large accretion rates, no simple, smooth transition between a cooling flow and an accretion flow is possible; the gas cools towards zero temperature just inside its sonic radius, which lies well outside the region where the gravitational influence of the central black hole is important. For accretion rates below a critical value, however, the accreting gas evolves smoothly from a radiatively driven cooling flow at large radii to a nearly adiabatic (Bondi) flow at small radii. We argue that this is the relevant parameter regime for most observed cooling flows. The transition from the cooling flow to the accretion flow should be observable in M87 with the {\it Chandra X-ray Observatory}.Comment: emulateapj.sty, 10 pages incl. 5 figures, to appear in Ap

A Curvature Flow Unifying Symplectic Curvature Flow And Pluriclosed Flow

Streets and Tian introduced pluriclosed flow and symplectic curvature flow in recent years. Here we construct a curvature flow to unify these two flows. We show the short time existence of our flow and exhibit an obstruction to long time existence.Comment: Corrected minor errors and updated references. Accepted in Pacific Journal of Mathematic

The flow network method

In this paper we propose an in-depth analysis of a method, called the flow network method, which associates with any network a complete and quasi-transitive binary relation on its vertices. Such a method, originally proposed by Gvozdik (1987), is based on the concept of maximum flow. Given a competition involving two or more teams, the flow network method can be used to build a relation on the set of teams which establishes, for every ordered pair of teams, if the first one did at least as good as the second one in the competition. Such a relation naturally induces procedures for ranking teams and selecting the best $k$ teams of a competition. Those procedures are proved to satisfy many desirable properties

Modal and nonmodal stability analysis of electrohydrodynamic flow with and without cross-flow

We report the results of a complete modal and nonmodal linear stability analysis of the electrohydrodynamic flow (EHD) for the problem of electroconvection in the strong injection region. Convective cells are formed by Coulomb force in an insulating liquid residing between two plane electrodes subject to unipolar injection. Besides pure electroconvection, we also consider the case where a cross-flow is present, generated by a streamwise pressure gradient, in the form of a laminar Poiseuille flow. The effect of charge diffusion, often neglected in previous linear stability analyses, is included in the present study and a transient growth analysis, rarely considered in EHD, is carried out. In the case without cross-flow, a non-zero charge diffusion leads to a lower linear stability threshold and thus to a more unstable low. The transient growth, though enhanced by increasing charge diffusion, remains small and hence cannot fully account for the discrepancy of the linear stability threshold between theoretical and experimental results. When a cross-flow is present, increasing the strength of the electric field in the high-$Re$ Poiseuille flow yields a more unstable flow in both modal and nonmodal stability analyses. Even though the energy analysis and the input-output analysis both indicate that the energy growth directly related to the electric field is small, the electric effect enhances the lift-up mechanism. The symmetry of channel flow with respect to the centerline is broken due to the additional electric field acting in the wall-normal direction. As a result, the centers of the streamwise rolls are shifted towards the injector electrode, and the optimal spanwise wavenumber achieving maximum transient energy growth increases with the strength of the electric field

Flow Distances on Open Flow Networks

Open flow network is a weighted directed graph with a source and a sink, depicting flux distributions on networks in the steady state of an open flow system. Energetic food webs, economic input-output networks, and international trade networks, are open flow network models of energy flows between species, money or value flows between industrial sectors, and goods flows between countries, respectively. Flow distances (first-passage or total) between any given two nodes $i$ and $j$ are defined as the average number of transition steps of a random walker along the network from $i$ to $j$ under some conditions. They apparently deviate from the conventional random walk distance on a closed directed graph because they consider the openness of the flow network. Flow distances are explicitly expressed by underlying Markov matrix of a flow system in this paper. With this novel theoretical conception, we can visualize open flow networks, calculating centrality of each node, and clustering nodes into groups. We apply flow distances to two kinds of empirical open flow networks, including energetic food webs and economic input-output network. In energetic food webs example, we visualize the trophic level of each species and compare flow distances with other distance metrics on graph. In input-output network, we rank sectors according to their average distances away other sectors, and cluster sectors into different groups. Some other potential applications and mathematical properties are also discussed. To summarize, flow distance is a useful and powerful tool to study open flow systems

Correlation Flow: Robust Optical Flow Using Kernel Cross-Correlators

Robust velocity and position estimation is crucial for autonomous robot navigation. The optical flow based methods for autonomous navigation have been receiving increasing attentions in tandem with the development of micro unmanned aerial vehicles. This paper proposes a kernel cross-correlator (KCC) based algorithm to determine optical flow using a monocular camera, which is named as correlation flow (CF). Correlation flow is able to provide reliable and accurate velocity estimation and is robust to motion blur. In addition, it can also estimate the altitude velocity and yaw rate, which are not available by traditional methods. Autonomous flight tests on a quadcopter show that correlation flow can provide robust trajectory estimation with very low processing power. The source codes are released based on the ROS framework.Comment: 2018 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2018

Nucleon Flow and Fragment Flow in Heavy Ion Reactions

The collective flow of nucleons and that of fragments in the 12C + 12C reaction below 150 MeV/nucleon are calculated with the antisymmetrized version of molecular dynamics combined with the statistical decay calculation. Density dependent Gogny force is used as the effective interaction. The calculated balance energy is about 100 MeV/nucleon, which is close to the observed value. Below the balance energy, the absolute value of the fragment flow is larger than that of nucleon flow, which is also in accordance with data. The dependence of the flow on the stochastic collision cross section and its origin are discussed. All the results are naturally understood by introducing the concept of two components of flow: the flow of dynamically emitted nucleons and the flow of the nuclear matter which contributes to both the flow of fragments and the flow of nucleons due to the statistical decay.Comment: 20 pages, PostScript figures, LaTeX with REVTeX and EPSF, KUNS 121