In this paper, we will develop a new staggered hybridization technique for discontinuous Galerkin methods to discretize linear elastodynamic equations. The idea of hybridization is used extensively in many discontinuous Galerkin methods, but the idea of staggered hybridization is new. Our new approach offers several advantages, namely energy conservation, high-order optimal convergence, preservation of symmetry for the stress tensor, block diagonal mass matrices as well as low dispersion error. The key idea is to use two staggered hybrid variables to enforce the continuity of the velocity and the continuity of the normal component of the stress tensor on a staggered mesh. We prove the stability and the convergence of the proposed scheme in both the semi-discrete and the fully-discrete settings. Numerical results confirm the optimal rate of convergence and show that the method has a superconvergent property for dispersion. Furthermore, an application of this method to Rayleigh wave propagation is presented.

This paper proposes a two-level continuum transportation system approach to modeling a dynamic taxi traffic assignment (DTTA) problem in a dense network with real-time traffic information provision and three types of vehicles, including private cars, occupied taxis, and vacant taxis. The proposed approach treats the dense network as a continuum in the first level, in which private car and occupied taxi drivers are free to choose their paths in a two-dimensional continuous space. The proposed approach also divides the modeling region into many identical squares to form a cell-based network in the second level, in which the cells are classified into two categories: target cell with an acceptable expected rate of return (EROR) to vacant taxi drivers and non-target cell with an unacceptable EROR. The EROR associated with a cell is the ratio of the cumulative expected profit of a taxi driver who successfully picks up a customer during the customer search that starts from that cell to the sum of expected search time for this customer and expected occupied travel time to serve this customer. Based on the cell-based network, we develop a cell-based intervening opportunity model to capture the fact that vacant taxi drivers can meet a customer on the way to their destination zones and estimate the EROR. Each vacant taxi driver has a mixed strategy to determine his/her customer-search direction according to the EROR: Each vacant taxi driver in a target cell selects its neighbor cells with maximum EROR, and each vacant taxi driver in a non-target cell selects the travel time-based shortest path to his/her target cell. Meanwhile, each private car driver chooses the path that minimizes his/her own generalized travel cost, and each occupied taxi driver chooses the path that minimizes his/her customer's generalized in-vehicle travel cost. In our model, traffic density in the system is governed by the conservation law (CL), and the flow directions of different vehicles are determined by the path-choice strategies of their drivers, which are captured by Hamilton–Jacobi (HJ) equations. Both the proposed CL and HJ equations can be solved by the Lax–Friedrichs scheme, which forms the backbone of the developed solution algorithm. Finally, numerical examples and a case study are used to demonstrate the properties of the model, the performance of the solution algorithm, and the value of using our methodology for estimating network performance.

We present a stochastic Justh–Krishnaprasad flocking model describing interactions among individuals in a planar domain with their positions and heading angles. The deterministic counterpart of the proposed model describes the formation of nematic alignment in an ensemble of planar particles moving with a unit speed. When the noise is turned off, we show that the nematic alignment state, in which all heading angles are either same or the opposite, is nonlinearly stable using a Lyapunov functional approach. We employed a diameter-like functional via the rearrangement of heading angles in the 2π-interval. In contrast, under the additive noise, a continuous angle configuration will be deviated asymptotically from the nematic state. Nevertheless, in any finite-time interval, we will see that some part of angle configuration will stay close to the nematic state with a positive probability, where we call this phenomenon as stochastic persistency. We provide a quantitative estimate on the probability for stochastic persistency and compare several numerical examples with analytical results.

We investigate variational principles for the approximation of quantum dynamics that apply for approximation manifolds that do not have complex linear tangent spaces. The first one, dating back to McLachlan (1964) minimizes the residuum of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, while the second one, originating from the lecture notes of Kramer--Saraceno (1981), imposes the stationarity of an action functional. We characterize both principles in terms of metric and a symplectic orthogonality conditions, consider their conservation properties, and derive an elementary a-posteriori error estimate. As an application, we revisit the time-dependent Hartree approximation and frozen Gaussian wave packets.

Pseudospin, an additional degree of freedom inherent in graphene, plays a key role in understanding many fundamental phenomena such as the anomalous quantum Hall effect, electron chirality and Klein paradox. Unlike the electron spin, the pseudospin was traditionally considered as an unmeasurable quantity, immune to Stern-Gerlach-type experiments. Recently, however, it has been suggested that graphene pseudospin is a real angular momentum that might manifest itself as an observable quantity, but so far direct tests of such a momentum remained unfruitful. Here, by selective excitation of two sublattices of an artificial photonic graphene, we demonstrate pseudospin-mediated vortex generation and topological charge flipping in otherwise uniform optical beams with Bloch momentum traversing through the Dirac points. Corroborated by numerical solutions of the linear massless Dirac-Weyl equation, we show that pseudospin can turn into orbital angular momentum completely, thus upholding the belief that pseudospin is not merely for theoretical elegance but rather physically measurable.