We provide a complete and rigorous description of phase transitions for kinetic models of self-propelled particles interacting through alignment. These models exhibit a competition between alignment and noise. Both the alignment frequency and noise intensity depend on a measure of the local alignment. We show that, in the spatially homogeneous case, the phase transition features (number and nature of equilibria, stability, convergence rate, phase diagram, hysteresis) are totally encoded in how the ratio between the alignment and noise intensities depend on the local alignment. In the spatially inhomogeneous case, we derive the macroscopic models associated to the stable equilibria and classify their hyperbolicity according to the same function.

For strong solutions of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in bounded domains with velocity specified at the boundary, we establish the unconditional stability and convergence of discretization schemes that decouple the updates of pressure and velocity through explicit time stepping for pressure. These schemes require no solution of stationary Stokes systems, nor any compatibility between velocity and pressure spaces to ensure an inf-sup condition, and are representative of a class of highly efficient computational methods that have recently emerged. The proofs are simple, based upon a new, sharp estimate for the commutator of the Laplacian and Helmholtz projection operators. This allows us to treat an unconstrained formulation of the Navier-Stokes equations as a perturbed diffusion equation. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This work considers the rigorous derivation of continuum models of step motion starting from a mesoscopic Burton-Cabrera-Frank (BCF) type model following the work [Xiang, SIAM J. Appl. Math. 2002]. We prove that as the lattice parameter goes to zero, for a finite time interval, a modified discrete model converges to the strong solution of the limiting PDE with first order convergence rate.

We study the limiting probability distribution of the homogenization error for second order elliptic equations in divergence form with highly oscillatory periodic conductivity coefficients and highly oscillatory stochastic potential. The effective conductivity coefficients are the same as those of the standard periodic homogenization, and the effective potential is given by the mean. We show that the limiting distribution of the random part of the homogenization error, as random elements in proper Hilbert spaces, is Gaussian and can be characterized by the homogenized Green's function, the homogenized solution and the statistics of the random potential. This generalizes previous results in the setting with slowly varying diffusion coefficients, and the current setting with fast oscillations in the differential operator requires new methods to prove compactness of the probability distributions of the random fluctuation.

During the past year a group of 12 graduate students, a visiting researcher and a postdoctoral fellow, supported in part by this contract, have studied various nonlinear partial differential equations. Seminars were held twice weekly on the topic of soliton theory. The graduate students involved have been studying the problem of singularity that arises in nonlinear equations.