The experimental achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation (1995) and of Fermi degeneracy (1999) in ultra-cold, dilute gases has opened a new field in atomic physics and condensed matter physics. This thesis presents an overview of theoretical and experimental facts on ultra-cold atomic gases. A Green's function scheme is examined, and the book also applies a novel spin-density-functional approach to the study of Fermi gases inside one-dimensional optical lattices.
This book is devoted to studying algorithms for the solution of a class of quadratic matrix and vector equations. These equations appear, in different forms, in several practical applications, especially in applied probability and control theory. The equations are first presented using a novel unifying approach; then, specific numerical methods are presented for the cases most relevant for applications, and new algorithms and theoretical results developed by the author are presented. The book focuses on “matrix multiplication-rich” iterations such as cyclic reduction and the structured doubling algorithm (SDA) and contains a variety of new research results which, as of today, are only available in articles or preprints.
Defining and computing a greatest common divisor of two polynomials with inexact coefficients is a classical problem in symbolic-numeric computation. The first part of this book reviews the main results that have been proposed so far in the literature. As usual with polynomial computations, the polynomial GCD problem can be expressed in matrix form: the second part of the book focuses on this point of view and analyses the structure of the relevant matrices, such as Toeplitz, Toepliz-block and displacement structures. New algorithms for the computation of approximate polynomial GCD are presented, along with extensive numerical tests. The use of matrix structure allows, in particular, to lower the asymptotic computational cost from cubic to quadratic order with respect to polynomial degree.
The book addresses several aspects of thermodynamics and correlations in the strongly-interacting regime of one-dimensional bosons, a topic at the forefront of current theoretical and experimental studies. Strongly correlated systems of one-dimensional bosons have a long history of theoretical study. Their experimental realisation in ultracold atom experiments is the subject of current research, which took off in the early 2000s. Yet these experiments raise new theoretical questions, just begging to be answered. Correlation functions are readily available for experimental measurements. In this book, they are tackled by means of sophisticated theoretical methods developed in condensed matter physics and mathematical physics, such as bosonization, the Bethe Ansatz and conformal field theory. Readers are introduced to these techniques, which are subsequently used to investigate many-body static and dynamical correlation functions.
This study provides innovative mathematical models for assessing the eruption probability and associated volcanic hazards, and applies them to the Campi Flegrei caldera in Italy. Throughout the book, significant attention is devoted to quantifying the sources of uncertainty affecting the forecast estimates. The Campi Flegrei caldera is certainly one of the world’s highest-risk volcanoes, with more than 70 eruptions over the last 15,000 years, prevalently explosive ones of varying magnitude, intensity and vent location. In the second half of the twentieth century the volcano apparently once again entered a phase of unrest that continues to the present. Hundreds of thousands of people live inside the caldera and over a million more in the nearby city of Naples, making a future eruption of Campi Flegrei an event with potentially catastrophic consequences at the national and European levels.
This book describes the searches that lead to the discovery of a Higgs boson performed at CMS, one of the two main experiments at the CERN LHC. After an overview of the theory and of the CMS experiment, all search channels are described, with emphasis on the ones with the best sensitivity. The statistical methodology used to analyse and the outcomes of the searches and the discovery results are then presented in detail.
The first part of the book is devoted to the transport equation for a given vector field, exploiting the lagrangian structure of solutions. It also treats the regularity of solutions of some degenerate elliptic equations, which appear in the eulerian counterpart of some transport models with congestion. The second part of the book deals with the lagrangian structure of solutions of the Vlasov-Poisson system, which describes the evolution of a system of particles under the self-induced gravitational/electrostatic field, and the existence of solutions of the semigeostrophic system, used in meteorology to describe the motion of large-scale oceanic/atmospheric flows.
In this thesis, we study the regularity of optimal transport maps and its applications to the semi-geostrophic system. The first two chapters survey the known theory, in particular there is a self-contained proof of Brenier’ theorem on existence of optimal transport maps and of Caffarelli’s Theorem on Holder continuity of optimal maps. In the third and fourth chapter we start investigating Sobolev regularity of optimal transport maps, while in Chapter 5 we show how the above mentioned results allows to prove the existence of Eulerian solution to the semi-geostrophic equation. In Chapter 6 we prove partial regularity of optimal maps with respect to a generic cost functions (it is well known that in this case global regularity can not be expected). More precisely we show that if the target and source measure have smooth densities the optimal map is always smooth outside a closed set of measure zero.
We study the existence and regularity of optimal domains for functionals depending on the spectrum of the Dirichlet Laplacian or of more general Schrödinger operators. The domains are subject to perimeter and volume constraints; we also take into account the possible presence of geometric obstacles. We investigate the properties of the optimal sets and of the optimal state functions. In particular, we prove that the eigenfunctions are Lipschitz continuous up to the boundary and that the optimal sets subject to the perimeter constraint have regular free boundary. We also consider spectral optimization problems in non-Euclidean settings and optimization problems for potentials and measures, as well as multiphase and optimal partition problems.
This thesis deals with specific features of the theory of holomorphic dynamics in dimension 2 and then sets out to study analogous questions in higher dimensions, e.g. dealing with normal forms for rigid germs, and examples of Kato 3-folds. The local dynamics of holomorphic maps around critical points is still not completely understood, in dimension 2 or higher, due to the richness of the geometry of the critical set for all iterates. In dimension 2, the study of the dynamics induced on a suitable functional space (the valuative tree) allows a classification of such maps up to birational conjugacy, reducing the problem to the special class of rigid germs, where the geometry of the critical set is simple. In some cases, from such dynamical data one can construct special compact complex surfaces, called Kato surfaces, related to some conjectures in complex geometry.
This book presents contributions on the current problems in a number of topical areas of nonlinear dynamics and physics, written by experts from Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Germany, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, the USA, and France. The book is dedicated to Professor Leonid I. Manevitch, an outstanding scholar in the fields of Mechanics of Solids, Nonlinear Dynamics, and Polymer Physics, on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
Condensed matter is one of the most active fields of physics, with a stream of discoveries in areas from superfluidity and magnetism to the optical, electronic and mechanical properties of materials such as semiconductors, polymers and carbon nanotubes. It includes the study of well-characterised solid surfaces, interfaces and nanostructures as well as studies of molecular liquids (molten salts, ionic solutions, liquid metals and semiconductors) and soft matter systems (colloidal suspensions, polymers, surfactants, foams, liquid crystals, membranes, biomolecules etc) including glasses and biological aspects of soft matter. The book presents state-of-art research in this exciting field.