We consider the theory of correctors to homogenization in stationary transport equations with rapidly oscillating, random coefficients. Let ε << 1 be the ratio of the correlation length in the random medium to the overall distance of propagation. As ε↓0, we show that the heterogeneous transport solution is well-approximated by a homogeneous transport solution. We then show that the rescaled corrector converges in (probability) distribution and weakly in the space and velocity variables, to a Gaussian process as an application of a central limit result. The latter result requires strong assumptions on the statistical structure of randomness and is proved for random processes constructed by means of a Poisson point process.

We establish that boundary degrees of freedom associated with a generic codimension one null surface in D-dimensional pure Einstein gravity naturally admit a thermodynamical description. We expect the null surface thermodynamics to universally follow as a result of the diffeomorphism invariance of the theory, not relying on other special features of the null surface or the gravity theory. Using standard surface charge analysis and covariant phase-space method, we formulate laws of null surface thermodynamics which are local equations over an arbitrary null surface paralleling local versions of the zeroth- and first laws and the Gibbs-Duhem equation. This thermodynamical system is generally an open system and can be closed only when there is no flux of gravitons through the null surface. Our analysis extends the usual black hole thermodynamics to a universal feature of any area element on a generic null surface. We discuss the relevance of our study for the membrane paradigm and black hole microstates.

We consider the effect of small scale random fluctuations of the constitutive coefficients on boundary measurements of solutions to radiative transfer equations. As the correlation length of the random oscillations tends to zero, the transport solution is well approximated by a deterministic, averaged, solution. In this paper, we analyze the random fluctuations to the averaged solution, which may be interpreted as a central limit correction to homogenization. With the inverse transport problem in mind, we characterize the random structure of the singular components of the transport measurement operator. In regimes of moderate scattering, such components provide stable reconstructions of the constitutive parameters in the transport equation. We show that the random fluctuations strongly depend on the decorrelation properties of the random medium.

We study 2d and 3d gravity theories on spacetimes with causal (timelike or null) codimension one boundaries while allowing for variations in the position of the boundary. We construct the corresponding solution phase space and specify boundary degrees freedom by analysing boundary (surface) charges labelling them. We discuss Y and W freedoms and change of slicing in the solution space. For D dimensional case we find D + 1 surface charges, which are generic functions over the causal boundary. We show that there exist solution space slicings in which the charges are integrable. For the 3d case there exists an integrable slicing where charge algebra takes the form of Heisenberg ⊕ A3 where A3 is two copies of Virasoro at Brown-Henneaux central charge for AdS3 gravity and BMS3 for the 3d flat space gravity.

In this article, we propose a numerical method based on sparse Gaussian processes (SGPs) to solve nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). The SGP algorithm is based on a Gaussian process (GP) method, which approximates the solution of a PDE with the maximum a posteriori probability estimator of a GP conditioned on the PDE evaluated at a finite number of sample points. The main bottleneck of the GP method lies in the inversion of a covariance matrix, whose cost grows cubically with respect to the size of samples. To improve the scalability of the GP method while retaining desirable accuracy, we draw inspiration from SGP approximations, where inducing points are introduced to summarize the information of samples. More precisely, our SGP method uses a Gaussian prior associated with a low-rank kernel generated by inducing points randomly selected from samples. In the SGP method, the size of the matrix to be inverted is proportional to the number of inducing points, which is much less than the size of the samples. The numerical experiments show that the SGP method using less than half of the uniform samples as inducing points achieves comparable accuracy to the GP method using the same number of uniform samples, which significantly reduces the computational cost. We give the existence proof for the approximation to the solution of a PDE and provide rigorous error analysis.