More Like this

1. Stability and chaos in dynamical last passage percolation

   https://doi.org/10.1090/cams/35  

   Ganguly, Shirshendu; Hammond, Alan (June 2024, Communications of the American Mathematical Society)

   Many complex disordered systems in statistical mechanics are characterized by intricate energy landscapes. The ground state, the configuration with lowest energy, lies at the base of the deepest valley. In important examples, such as Gaussian polymers and spin glass models, the landscape has many valleys and the abundance of near-ground states (at the base of valleys) indicates the phenomenon ofchaos, under which the ground state alters profoundly when the disorder of the model is slightly perturbed. In this article, we compute the critical exponent that governs the onset of chaos in a dynamic manifestation of a canonical model in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang [KPZ] universality class, Brownian last passage percolation [LPP]. In this model in its static form, semidiscrete polymers advance through Brownian noise, their energy given by the integral of the white noise encountered along their journey. A ground state is ageodesic, of extremal energy given its endpoints. We perturb Brownian LPP by evolving the disorder under an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck flow. We prove that, for polymers of length $n$, a sharp phase transition marking the onset of chaos is witnessed at the critical time $n^{-<\#comment/>1/3}$. Indeed, the overlap between the geodesics at times zero and $t>0$that travel a given distance of order $n$will be shown to be of order $n$when $t\ll <\#comment/>n^{-<\#comment/>1/3}$; and to be of smaller order when $t\gg <\#comment/>n^{-<\#comment/>1/3}$. We expect this exponent to be universal across a wide range of interface models. The present work thus sheds light on the dynamical aspect of the KPZ class; it builds on several recent advances. These include Chatterjee’s harmonic analytic theory [Superconcentration and related topics, Springer, Cham, 2014] of equivalence ofsuperconcentrationandchaosin Gaussian spaces; a refined understanding of the static landscape geometry of Brownian LPP developed in the companion paper (see S. Ganguly and A. Hammond [Electron. J. Probab. 28 (2023), 80 pp.]); and, underlying the latter, strong comparison estimates of the geodesic energy profile to Brownian motion (see J. Calvert, A. Hammond, and M. Hegde [Astérisque 441 (2023), pp. v+119]). 

   more » « less
2. Stable Big Bang formation for Einstein’s equations: The complete sub-critical regime

   https://doi.org/10.1090/jams/1015  

   Fournodavlos, Grigorios; Rodnianski, Igor; Speck, Jared (July 2023, Journal of the American Mathematical Society)

   For $(t,x)\in <\#comment/>(0,\mathrm{\infty <\#comment/>})\times <\#comment/>{\mathbb{T}}^{\mathfrak{D}}$, the generalized Kasner solutions (which we refer to as Kasner solutions for short) are a family of explicit solutions to various Einstein-matter systems that, exceptional cases aside, start out smooth but then develop a Big Bang singularity as $t\downarrow <\#comment/>0$, i.e., a singularity along an entire spacelike hypersurface, where various curvature scalars blow up monotonically. The family is parameterized by the Kasner exponents ${\stackrel{~<\#comment/>}{q}}_1,\cdots <\#comment/>,{\stackrel{~<\#comment/>}{q}}_{\mathfrak{D}}\in <\#comment/>\mathbb{R}$, which satisfy two algebraic constraints. There are heuristics in the mathematical physics literature, going back more than 50 years, suggesting that the Big Bang formation should be dynamically stable, that is, stable under perturbations of the Kasner initial data, given say at $\{t=1\}$, as long as the exponents are “sub-critical” in the following sense: $\underset{\begin{array}{c}I,J,B=1,\cdots <\#comment/>,\mathfrak{D}\\ I>J\end{array}}{max}\{{\stackrel{~<\#comment/>}{q}}_I+{\stackrel{~<\#comment/>}{q}}_J-<\#comment/>{\stackrel{~<\#comment/>}{q}}_B\}>1$. Previous works have rigorously shown the dynamic stability of the Kasner Big Bang singularity under stronger assumptions: (1) the Einstein-scalar field system with $\mathfrak{D}=3$and ${\stackrel{~<\#comment/>}{q}}_1\approx <\#comment/>{\stackrel{~<\#comment/>}{q}}_2\approx <\#comment/>{\stackrel{~<\#comment/>}{q}}_3\approx <\#comment/>1/3$, which corresponds to the stability of the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker solution’s Big Bang or (2) the Einstein-vacuum equations for $\mathfrak{D}\ge <\#comment/>38$with $\underset{I=1,\cdots <\#comment/>,\mathfrak{D}}{max}|{\stackrel{~<\#comment/>}{q}}_I|>1/6$. In this paper, we prove that the Kasner singularity is dynamically stable forallsub-critical Kasner exponents, thereby justifying the heuristics in the literature in the full regime where stable monotonic-type curvature-blowup is expected. We treat in detail the $1+\mathfrak{D}$-dimensional Einstein-scalar field system for all $\mathfrak{D}\ge <\#comment/>3$and the $1+\mathfrak{D}$-dimensional Einstein-vacuum equations for $\mathfrak{D}\ge <\#comment/>10$; both of these systems feature non-empty sets of sub-critical Kasner solutions. Moreover, for the Einstein-vacuum equations in $1+3$dimensions, where instabilities are in general expected, we prove that all singular Kasner solutions have dynamically stable Big Bangs under polarized $U\left(1\right)$-symmetric perturbations of their initial data. Our results hold for open sets of initial data in Sobolev spaces without symmetry, apart from our work on polarized $U\left(1\right)$-symmetric solutions. Our proof relies on a new formulation of Einstein’s equations: we use a constant-mean-curvature foliation, and the unknowns are the scalar field, the lapse, the components of the spatial connection and second fundamental form relative to a Fermi–Walker transported spatial orthonormal frame, and the components of the orthonormal frame vectors with respect to a transported spatial coordinate system. In this formulation, the PDE evolution system for the structure coefficients of the orthonormal frame approximately diagonalizes in a way that sharply reveals the significance of the Kasner exponent sub-criticality condition for the dynamic stability of the flow: the condition leads to the time-integrability of many terms in the equations, at least at the low derivative levels. At the high derivative levels, the solutions that we study can be much more singular with respect to $t$, and to handle this difficulty, we use $t$-weighted high order energies, and we control non-linear error terms by exploiting monotonicity induced by the $t$-weights and interpolating between the singularity-strength of the solution’s low order and high order derivatives. Finally, we note that our formulation of Einstein’s equations highlights the quantities that might generate instabilities outside of the sub-critical regime. 

   more » « less
3. The weak-type Carleson theorem via wave packet estimates

   https://doi.org/10.1090/tran/9303  

   Di_Plinio, Francesco; Fragkos, Anastasios (March 2025, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society)

   We prove that the weak- $L^p$norms, and in fact the sparse $(p,1)$-norms, of the Carleson maximal partial Fourier sum operator are $\lesssim <\#comment/>(p-<\#comment/>1{)}^{-<\#comment/>1}$as $p\to <\#comment/>1^{+}$. This is an improvement on the Carleson-Hunt theorem, where the same upper bound on the growth order is obtained for the restricted weak- $L^p$type norm, and which was the strongest quantitative bound prior to our result. Furthermore, our sparse $(p,1)$-norms bound imply new and stronger results at the endpoint $p=1$. In particular, we obtain that the Fourier series of functions from the weighted Arias de Reyna space ${\mathrm{Q}\mathrm{A}}_{\mathrm{\infty <\#comment/>}}\left(w\right)$, which contains the weighted Antonov space $L\log <\#comment/>L\log <\#comment/>\log <\#comment/>\log <\#comment/>L(\mathbb{T};w)$, converge almost everywhere whenever $w\in <\#comment/>A_1$. This is an extension of the results of Antonov [Proceedings of the XXWorkshop on Function Theory (Moscow, 1995), 1996, pp. 187–196] and Arias De Reyna, where $w$must be Lebesgue measure. The backbone of our treatment is a new, sharply quantified near- $L^1$Carleson embedding theorem for the modulation-invariant wave packet transform. The proof of the Carleson embedding relies on a newly developed smooth multi-frequency decomposition which, near the endpoint $p=1$, outperforms the abstract Hilbert space approach of past works, including the seminal one by Nazarov, Oberlin and Thiele [Math. Res. Lett. 17 (2010), pp. 529–545]. As a further example of application, we obtain a quantified version of the family of sparse bounds for the bilinear Hilbert transforms due to Culiuc, Ou and the first author. 

   more » « less
4. The principal Floquet bundle and the dynamics of fast diffusing communities

   https://doi.org/10.1090/tran/8975  

   Lam, King-Yeung; Lou, Yuan (October 2023, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society)

   We consider, for $N\ge <\#comment/>2$, the system of $N$competing species which are ecologically identical and having distinct diffusion rates $\{D_i{\}}_{i=1}^N$, in an environment with the carrying capacity $m(x,t)$. For a generic class of $m(x,t)$that varies with space and time, we show that there is a positive number $D_{\ast <\#comment/>}$independent of $N$so that if $D_i\ge <\#comment/>D_{\ast <\#comment/>}$for all $1\le <\#comment/>i\le <\#comment/>N$, then the slowest diffusing species is able to competitively exclude all other species. In the case when the environment is temporally constant or temporally periodic, our result provides some further evidence in the affirmative direction regarding the conjecture by Dockery et al. [J. Math. Biol. 37 (1998), pp. 61–83]. The main tool is the theory of the principal Floquet bundle for linear parabolic equations. 

   more » « less
5. Products of normal subsets

   https://doi.org/10.1090/tran/8960  

   Larsen, Michael; Shalev, Aner; Tiep, Pham (February 2024, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society)

   In this paper we consider which families of finite simple groups $G$have the property that for each $\mathrm{ϵ<\#comment/>}>0$there exists $N>0$such that, if $|G|\ge <\#comment/>N$and $S,T$are normal subsets of $G$with at least $\mathrm{ϵ<\#comment/>}|G|$elements each, then every non-trivial element of $G$is the product of an element of $S$and an element of $T$. We show that this holds in a strong and effective sense for finite simple groups of Lie type of bounded rank, while it does not hold for alternating groups or groups of the form ${\mathrm{P}\mathrm{S}\mathrm{L}}_n\left(q\right)$where $q$is fixed and $n\to <\#comment/>\mathrm{\infty <\#comment/>}$. However, in the case $S=T$and $G$alternating this holds with an explicit bound on $N$in terms of $\mathrm{ϵ<\#comment/>}$. Related problems and applications are also discussed. In particular we show that, if $w_1,w_2$are non-trivial words, $G$is a finite simple group of Lie type of bounded rank, and for $g\in <\#comment/>G$, $P_{w_1\left(G\right),w_2\left(G\right)}\left(g\right)$denotes the probability that $g_1{g}_2=g$where $g_i\in <\#comment/>w_i\left(G\right)$are chosen uniformly and independently, then, as $|G|\to <\#comment/>\mathrm{\infty <\#comment/>}$, the distribution $P_{w_1\left(G\right),w_2\left(G\right)}$tends to the uniform distribution on $G$with respect to the $L^{\mathrm{\infty <\#comment/>}}$norm. 

   more » « less