Featured Researches

Dynamical Systems

Brouwer's satellite solution redux

Brouwer's solution to the artificial satellite problem is revisited to show that the complete Hamiltonian reduction is rather achieved in the plain Poincaré's style, through a single canonical transformation, than using a sequence of partial reductions based on von Zeipel's alternative for dealing with perturbed degenerate Hamiltonian systems.

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Dynamical Systems

Bump attractors and waves in networks of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons

Bump attractors are wandering localised patterns observed in in vivo experiments of spatially-extended neurobiological networks. They are important for the brain's navigational system and specific memory tasks. A bump attractor is characterised by a core in which neurons fire frequently, while those away from the core do not fire. We uncover a relationship between bump attractors and travelling waves in a classical network of excitable, leaky integrate-and-fire neurons. This relationship bears strong similarities to the one between complex spatiotemporal patterns and waves at the onset of pipe turbulence. Waves in the spiking network are determined by a firing set, that is, the collection of times at which neurons reach a threshold and fire as the wave propagates. We define and study analytical properties of the voltage mapping, an operator transforming a solution's firing set into its spatiotemporal profile. This operator allows us to construct localised travelling waves with an arbitrary number of spikes at the core, and to study their linear stability. A homogeneous "laminar" state exists in the network, and it is linearly stable for all values of the principal control parameter. Sufficiently wide disturbances to the homogeneous state elicit the bump attractor. We show that one can construct waves with a seemingly arbitrary number of spikes at the core; the higher the number of spikes, the slower the wave, and the more its profile resembles a stationary bump. As in the fluid-dynamical analogy, such waves coexist with the homogeneous state, are unstable, and the solution branches to which they belong are disconnected from the laminar state; we provide evidence that the dynamics of the bump attractor displays echoes of the unstable waves, which form its building blocks.

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Dynamical Systems

CINDy: Conditional gradient-based Identification of Non-linear Dynamics -- Noise-robust recovery

Governing equations are essential to the study of nonlinear dynamics, often enabling the prediction of previously unseen behaviors as well as the inclusion into control strategies. The discovery of governing equations from data thus has the potential to transform data-rich fields where well-established dynamical models remain unknown. This work contributes to the recent trend in data-driven sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics of finding the best sparse fit to observational data in a large library of potential nonlinear models. We propose an efficient first-order Conditional Gradient algorithm for solving the underlying optimization problem. In comparison to the most prominent alternative algorithms, the new algorithm shows significantly improved performance on several essential issues like sparsity-induction, structure-preservation, noise robustness, and sample efficiency. We demonstrate these advantages on several dynamics from the field of synchronization, particle dynamics, and enzyme chemistry.

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Dynamical Systems

Cartan Spaces and Natural Foliations on the Cotangent Bundle

In this paper, the natural foliations in cotangent bundle T*M of Cartan space (M,K) are studied. It is shown that the geometry of these foliations is closely related to the geometry of the Cartan space (M,K) itself. This approach is used to obtain new characterizations of Cartan spaces with negative constant curvature.

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Dynamical Systems

Caustic-Free Regions for Billiards on Surfaces of Constant Curvature

In this note we study caustic-free regions for convex billiard tables in the hyperbolic plane or the hemisphere. In particular, following a result by Gutkin and Katok in the Euclidean case, we estimate the size of such regions in terms of the geometry of the billiard table. Moreover, we extend to this setting a theorem due to Hubacher which shows that no caustics exist near the boundary of a convex billiard table whose curvature is discontinuous.

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Dynamical Systems

Certain systems of three falling balls satisfy the Chernov-Sinai Ansatz

The system of falling balls is an autonomous Hamiltonian system with a smooth invariant measure and non-zero Lyapunov exponents almost everywhere. For almost three decades new, the question of its ergodicity remains open. We contribute to the solution of the erogodicity conjecture for three falling balls with a specific mass ratio in the following two points: First, we prove the Chernov-Sinai ansatz. Second, we prove that there is an abundance of sufficiently expanding points. It is of special interest that for the aforementioned specific mass ratio, the configuration space can be unfolded to a billiard table, where the proper alignment condition holds.

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Dynamical Systems

Chaos and frequent hypercyclicity for composition operators

The notions of chaos and frequent hypercyclicity enjoy an intimate relationship in linear dynamics. Indeed, after a series of partial results, it was shown by Bayart and Rusza in 2015 that for backward weighted shifts on ℓ p (Z) , the notions chaos and frequent hypercyclicity coincide. It is with some effort that one shows that these two notions are distinct. Bayart and Grivaux in 2007 constructed a non-chaotic frequently hypercyclic weighted shift on c 0 . It was only in 2017 that Menet settled negatively whether every chaotic operator is frequently hypercylic. In this article, we show that for a large class of composition operators on L p -spaces the notions of chaos and frequent hypercyclicity coincide. Moreover, in this particular class an invertible operator is frequently hypercyclic if and only if its inverse is frequently hypercyclic. This is in contrast to a very recent result of Menet where an invertible frequently hypercyclic operator on ℓ 1 whose inverse is not frequently hypercyclic is constructed.

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Dynamical Systems

Chaos predictability in a chemical reactor

The dynamics of the tubular chemical reactor with mass recycle were examined. In such a system, temperature and concentrations may oscillate chaotically. This means that state variable values are then unpredictable. In this paper it has been shown that despite the chaos, the behaviour of such a reactor can be predictable. It has been shown that this phenomenon can occur in two cases. The first case concerns intermittent chaos. It has been shown that intermittent outbursts can occur at regular intervals. The second case concerns transient chaos, i.e. a situation when the chaos occurs only for a certain period of time, e.g. only during start-up. This phenomenon makes it impossible to predict what will occur in the reactor in the nearest time, but, makes it possible to precisely determine the values of the variables even in the distant future. Both of these phenomena were tested by numerical simulation of the mathematical model of the reactor.

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Dynamical Systems

Chaotic dynamics in a simple predator-prey model with discrete delay

A discrete delay is included to model the time between the capture of the prey and its conversion to viable biomass in the simplest classical Gause type predator-prey model that has equilibrium dynamics without delay. As the delay increases from zero, the coexistence equilibrium undergoes a supercritical Hopf bifurcation, two saddle-node bifurcations of limit cycles, and a cascade of period doublings, eventu1ally leading to chaos. The resulting periodic orbits and the strange attractor resemble their counterparts for the Mackey-Glass equation. Due to the global stability of the system without delay, these complicated dynamics can be solely attributed to the introduction of the delay. Since many models include predator-prey like interactions as submodels, this study emphasizes the importance of understanding the implications of overlooking delay in such models on the reliability of the model-based predictions, especially since the temperature is known to have an effect on the length of certain delays.

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Dynamical Systems

Chaotic dynamics of a three particle array under Lennard--Jones type forces and a fixed area constraint

We consider the dynamical problem for a system of three particles in which the inter-particle forces are given as the gradient of a Lennard-Jones type potential. Furthermore we assume that the three particle array is subject to the constraint of fixed area. The corresponding mathematical problem is that of a conservative dynamical system over the manifold determined by the area constraint. We study numerically the stability of this system. In particular, using the recently introduced measure of chaos by Hunt and Ott (2015), we study numerically the possibility of chaotic behavior for this system.

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