Spontaneous pattern formation in a polariton condensate

Exciton-polariton condensation can be regarded as a self-organization phenomenon, where phase ordering is established among particles in the system. In such condensed systems, further ordering can occur in the particle density distribution, under particular experimental conditions. In this work we report on spontaneous pattern formation in a polariton condensate under nonresonant optical pumping. The slightly elliptical ring-shaped excitation laser that we employ forces condensation to occur into a single-energy state with periodic boundary conditions, giving rise to a multilobe standing-wave patterned state.     

Floating and sinking: the imprint of massive scalars around rotating black holes

We study the coupling of massive scalar fields to matter in orbit around rotating black holes. It is generally expected that orbiting bodies will lose energy in gravitational waves, slowly inspiraling into the black hole. Instead, we show that the coupling of the field to matter leads to a surprising effect: because of superradiance, matter can hover into "floating orbits" for which the net gravitational energy loss at infinity is entirely provided by the black hole's rotational energy. Orbiting bodies remain floating until they extract sufficient angular momentum from the black hole, or until perturbations or nonlinear effects disrupt the orbit. For slowly rotating and nonrotating black holes floating orbits are unlikely to exist, but resonances at orbital frequencies corresponding to quasibound states of the scalar field can speed up the inspiral, so that the orbiting body sinks. These effects could be a smoking gun of deviations from general relativity.     

Reverse mathematics and initial intervals

In this paper we study the reverse mathematics of two theorems by Bonnet about partial orders. These results concern the structure and cardinality of the collection of initial intervals. The first theorem states that a partial order has no infinite antichains if and only if its initial intervals are finite unions of ideals. The second one asserts that a countable partial order is scattered and does not contain infinite antichains if and only if it has countably many initial intervals. We show that the left to right directions of these theorems are equivalent to _ACA0${\mathsf{ACA}}_0$ and _ATR0${\mathsf{ATR}}_0$, respectively. On the other hand, the opposite directions are both provable in _WKL0${\mathsf{WKL}}_0$, but not in _RCA0${\mathsf{RCA}}_0$. We also prove the equivalence with _ACA0${\mathsf{ACA}}_0$ of the following result of Erdös and Tarski: a partial order with no infinite strong antichains has no arbitrarily large finite strong antichains.     

A note on Griffiths infinitesimal invariant for curves

Given a generic curve of genus $g\ge 4$ and a smooth point $L\in W_{g-1}^{1}(C)$ , whose linear system is base-point free, we consider the Abel–Jacobi normal function associated with $L^{\otimes 2}\otimes \omega _{C}^{-1}$ , when $(C,L)$ varies in moduli. We prove that its infinitesimal invariant reconstructs the couple $(C,L)$ . When $g=4$ , we obtain the generic Torelli theorem proved by Griffiths.     

On the spectrum of stiffness matrices arising from isogeometric analysis

We study the spectral properties of stiffness matrices that arise in the context of isogeometric analysis for the numerical solution of classical second order elliptic problems. Motivated by the applicative interest in the fast solution of the related linear systems, we are looking for a spectral characterization of the involved matrices. In particular, we investigate non-singularity, conditioning (extremal behavior), spectral distribution in the Weyl sense, as well as clustering of the eigenvalues to a certain (compact) subset of \(\mathbb C\) . All the analysis is related to the notion of symbol in the Toeplitz setting and is carried out both for the cases of 1D and 2D problems.     

Inner solvers for interior point methods for large scale nonlinear programming

This paper deals with the solution of nonlinear programming problems arising from elliptic control problems by an interior point scheme. At each step of the scheme, we have to solve a large scale symmetric and indefinite system; inner iterative solvers, with an adaptive stopping rule, can be used in order to avoid unnecessary inner iterations, especially when the current outer iterate is far from the solution. In this work, we analyse the method of multipliers and the preconditioned conjugate gradient method as inner solvers for interior point schemes. We discuss the convergence of the whole approach, the implementation details and report the results of numerical experimentation on a set of large scale test problems arising from the discretization of elliptic control problems. A comparison with other interior point codes is also reported. This research was supported by the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research (MIUR) projects: FIRB Project: “Parallel Nonlinear Numerical Optimization PN ² O” (grant n. RBAU01JYPN, ) and COFIN/PRIN04 Project “Numerical Methods and Mathematical Software for Applications” (grant n. 2004012559, ).     

Quadratic spline quasi-interpolants on Powell-Sabin partitions

In this paper we address the problem of constructing quasi-interpolants in the space of quadratic Powell-Sabin splines on nonuniform triangulations. Quasi-interpolants of optimal approximation order are proposed and numerical tests are presented. Dedicated to Prof. Mariano Gasca on the occasion of his 60th birthday.     

On a quadratic functional occurring in a bivariate scattered data interpolation problem

Sunto L’applicazione di noti metodi che utilizzano funzioni di tipo blending per la costruzione di funzioni bivariate C¹ per l’interpolazione di dati, richiede la conoscenza delle derivate parziali del primo ordine ai vertici di una triangolazione sottostante. In questo lavoro consideriamo il metodo proposto da Nielson, che consiste nel calcolare stime delle derivate parziali del primo ordine minimizzando un opportuno funzionale quadratico, caratterizzato da parametri di tensione non negativi. Scopo del lavoro è l’analisi di alcune proprietà particolari di questo funzionale per la costruzione di algoritmi efficienti e robusti per la determinazione delle stime suddette delle derivate quando si ha a che fare con insiemi di dati di grandi dimensioni. Abstract The application of widely known blending methods for constructingC ¹ bivariate functions interpolating scattered data requires the knowledge of the partial derivatives of first order at the vertices of an underlying triangulation. In this paper we consider the method proposed by Nielson that consists in computing estimates of the first order partial derivatives by minimizing an appropriate quadratic functional, characterized by nonnegative tension parameters. The aim of the paper is to analyse some peculiar properties of this functional in order to construct robust and efficient algorithms for determining the above estimates of the derivatives when we are concerned with extremely large data sets.      

Character degree graphs that are complete graphs

Let be a finite group, and write for the set of degrees of irreducible characters of . We define to be the graph whose vertex set is , and there is an edge between and if . We prove that if is a complete graph, then is a solvable group.

     

Mean value formulas for classical solutions to uniformly parabolic equations in the divergence form with non-smooth coefficients

We prove surface and volume mean value formulas for classical solutions to uniformly parabolic equations in the divergence form with low regularity of the coefficients. We then use them to prove the parabolic strong maximum principle and the parabolic Harnack inequality. We emphasize that our results only rely on the classical theory, and our arguments follow the lines used in the original theory of harmonic functions. We provide two proofs relying on two different formulations of the divergence theorem, one stated for sets with almost C¹-boundary, the other stated for sets with finite perimeter.