We give a geometric proof that any minimal length element in a (twisted) conjugacy class of a finite Coxeter group W has remarkable properties with respect to conjugation, taking powers in the associated braid monoid and taking the centralizer in W.

Let W be an extended affine Weyl group. We prove that the minimal length elements W of any conjugacy class W of W satisfy some nice properties, generalizing results of Geck and Pfeiffer [<i>On the irreducible characters of Hecke algebras</i>, Adv. Math. <b>102</b> (1993), 7994] on finite Weyl groups. We also study a special class of conjugacy classes, the straight conjugacy classes. These conjugacy classes are in a natural bijection with the Frobenius-twisted conjugacy classes of some W -adic group and satisfy additional interesting properties. Furthermore, we discuss some applications to the affine Hecke algebra W

We study the minimal length elements in some double cosets of Coxeter groups and use them to study Lusztig's <i>G</i>-stable pieces and the generalization of <i>G</i>-stable pieces introduced by Lu and Yakimov. We also use them to study the minimal length elements in a conjugacy class of a finite Coxeter group and prove a conjecture in [M. Geck, S. Kim, G. Pfeiffer, Minimal length elements in twisted conjugacy classes of finite Coxeter groups, J. Algebra 229 (2) (2000) 570600].

We propose a numerically efficient algorithm for simulating the multi-color optical self-focusing phenomena in nematic liquid crystals. The propagation of the nematicon is modeled by a parabolic wave equation coupled with a nonlinear elliptic partial differential equation governing the angle between the crystal and the direction of propagation. Numerically, the paraxial parabolic wave equation is solved by a fast Huygens sweeping method, while the nonlinear elliptic PDE is handled by the alternating direction explicit (ADE) method. The overall algorithm is shown to be numerically efficient for computing high frequency beam propagations.

We propose a computational efficient yet simple numerical algorithm to solve the surface eikonal equation on general implicit surfaces. The method is developed based on the embedding idea and the fast sweeping methods. We first approximate the solution to the surface eikonal equation by the Euclidean weighted distance function defined in a tubular neighbourhood of the implicit surface, and then apply the efficient fast sweeping method to numerically compute the corresponding viscosity solution. Unlike some other embedding methods which require the radius of the computational tube satisfies h = O ( x ) for some h = O ( x ) , our approach allows h = O ( x ) . This implies that the total number of grid points in the computational tube is optimal and is given by h = O ( x ) for a co-dimensional one surface in h = O ( x ) . The method can be easily extended to general static HamiltonJacobi equation defined on implicit