The study of transport and mixing processes in dynamical systems is
particularly important for the analysis of mathematical models of physical
systems. We propose a novel, direct geometric method to identify subsets of
phase space that remain strongly coherent over a finite time duration. This new
method is based on a dynamic extension of classical (static) isoperimetric
problems; the latter are concerned with identifying submanifolds with the
smallest boundary size relative to their volume.
The present work introduces \emph{dynamic} isoperimetric problems; the study
of sets with small boundary size relative to volume \emph{as they are evolved
by a general dynamical system}. We formulate and prove dynamic versions of the
fundamental (static) isoperimetric (in)equalities; a dynamic Federer-Fleming
theorem and a dynamic Cheeger inequality. We introduce a new dynamic Laplacian
operator and describe a computational method to identify coherent sets based on
eigenfunctions of the dynamic Laplacian.
Our results include formal mathematical statements concerning geometric
properties of finite-time coherent sets, whose boundaries can be regarded as
Lagrangian coherent structures. The computational advantages of our new
approach are a well-separated spectrum for the dynamic Laplacian, and
flexibility in appropriate numerical approximation methods. Finally, we
demonstrate that the dynamic Laplacian operator can be realised as a
zero-diffusion limit of a newly advanced probabilistic transfer operator method
(Froyland, 2013) for finding coherent sets, which is based on small diffusion.
Thus, the present approach sits naturally alongside the probabilistic approach
(Froyland, 2013), and adds a formal geometric interpretation