We give a sharp upper estimate for the response of boundary current-voltage measurements to perturbations of the admittivity in a body that are localized in space and frequency. We calculate the differential of the measurement mapping and study the$Gabor symbol$of this operator.

A fundamental solution of the acoustical equation with a variable refraction coefficient is constructed. The solution satisfies the limiting absorption and radiation conditions. The optimal high frequency estimate is proved for square means of the solution. The source function for the diffusion equation is a by-product of this construction.

As a tool for solving the Neumann problem for divergence-form equations, Kenig and Pipher introduced the space ${\mathcal{X}}$ of functions on the half-space, such that the non-tangential maximal function of their$L$_{2}Whitney averages belongs to$L$_{2}on the boundary. In this paper, answering questions which arose from recent studies of boundary value problems by Auscher and the second author, we find the pre-dual of ${\mathcal{X}}$ , and characterize the pointwise multipliers from ${\mathcal{X}}$ to$L$_{2}on the half-space as the well-known Carleson-type space of functions introduced by Dahlberg. We also extend these results to$L$_{$p$}generalizations of the space ${\mathcal{X}}$ . Our results elaborate on the well-known duality between Carleson measures and non-tangential maximal functions.

We investigate systems of self-propelled particles with alignment interaction. Compared to previous work (Degond and Motsch, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci. 18:1193–1215, 2008a; Frouvelle, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci., 2012), the force acting on the particles is not normalized, and this modification gives rise to phase transitions from disordered states at low density to aligned states at high densities. This model is the space-inhomogeneous extension of (Frouvelle and Liu, Dynamics in a kinetic model of oriented particles with phase transition, 2012), in which the existence and stability of the equilibrium states were investigated. When the density is lower than a threshold value, the dynamics is described by a nonlinear diffusion equation. By contrast, when the density is larger than this threshold value, the dynamics is described by a similar hydrodynamic model for self-alignment interactions as derived in (Degond and Motsch, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci. 18:1193–1215, 2008a; Frouvelle, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci., 2012). However, the modified normalization of the force gives rise to different convection speeds, and the resulting model may lose its hyperbolicity in some regions of the state space.

In contrast to the usual quantum systems which have at most a finite number of open spectral gaps if they are periodic in more than one direction, periodic quantum graphs may have gaps arbitrarily high in the spectrum. This property of graph Hamiltonians, being generic in a sense, inspires the question about the existence of graphs with a finite and nonzero number of spectral gaps. We show that the answer depends on the vertex couplings together with commensurability of the graph edges. A finite and nonzero number of gaps is excluded for graphs with scale invariant couplings; on the other hand, we demonstrate that graphs featuring a finite nonzero number of gaps do exist, illustrating the claim on the example of a rectangular lattice with a suitably tuned -coupling at the vertices.