Quicklists
public 01:29:47

Marija Vucelja : A glass transition in population genetics: Emergence of clones in populations

  -   Nonlinear and Complex Systems ( 189 Views )

The fields of evolution and population genetics are undergoing a renaissance, due to the abundance of sequencing data. On the other hand, the existing theories are often unable to explain the experimental findings. It is not clear what sets the time scales of evolution, whether for antibiotic resistance, an emergence of new animal species, or the diversification of life. The emerging picture of genetic evolution is that of a strongly interacting stochastic system with large numbers of components far from equilibrium. In this talk, I plan to focus on the clone competition and discuss the diversity of a random population that undergoes selection and recombination (sexual reproduction). Recombination reshuffles genetic material while selection amplifies the fittest genotypes. If recombination is more rapid than selection, a population consists of a diverse mixture of many genotypes, as is observed in many populations. In the opposite regime, selection can amplify individual genotypes into large clones, and the population reaches the so-called "clonal condensation". I hope to convince you that our work provides a qualitative explanation of clonal condensation. I will point out the similarity between clonal condensation and the freezing transition in the Random Energy Model of spin glasses. I will conclude with a summary of our present understanding of the clonal condensation phenomena and describe future directions and connections to statistical physics.

public 01:14:52

Arya Roy : Fans and Schemes

  -   Colloquium ( 188 Views )

public 01:39:37

Andrew D Bragg : Lagrangian irreversibility and inversions in 3 and 2 dimensional turbulence

  -   Nonlinear and Complex Systems ( 153 Views )

Studying how small inertial particles suspended in turbulent flows move relative to each other provides fundamental insights into their transport, mixing and collisions. These insights are crucial for tackling diverse problems ranging from droplet growth in warm clouds, to planetesimal formation through collisional aggregation in turbulent protoplanetary nebula. A deeper understanding of the relative motion of the particles can be obtained by investigating both their forward-in-time (FIT) and backward-in-time (BIT) dispersion. When FIT and BIT dispersion are different it signifies irreversibility, and since FIT and BIT dispersion are related to different problems, understanding the irreversibility is of fundamental and practical importance.
I will present new theoretical arguments and asymptotic predictions, along with results from Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of the governing equations, to show that inertial particle dispersion can be very strongly irreversible in turbulence, with BIT being much faster than FIT dispersion in 3-dimensional turbulence. The results also show that inertial particles can disperse much faster than fluid (interialess) particles. I will also present arguments, confirmed by DNS results, that in 2-dimensional turbulence the nature of the irreversibility and the direction of the particle energy fluxes can invert when the particle inertia exceeds a certain threshold. These results significantly advance our understanding of dispersion problems, and lead to new capabilities for predicting the effect of inertia on the rate at which particles spread out and mix together in turbulence, and the rate at which they collide.

public 01:29:47

John Dolbow : On the Surfactant-Driven Fracture of Particulate Rafts

  -   Nonlinear and Complex Systems ( 146 Views )

Over the past decade, much attention has focused on the behavior of hydrophobic particles at interfaces. These systems are of interest to scientists and engineers, for example, due to their potential for stabilizing drops and emulsions via jamming. This seminar will focus on the behavior of particulate 'rafts' that form when a monolayer of particles are placed at an air- liquid interface. The particles interact with the underlying fluid to form a quasi two-dimensional solid. Such particulate rafts can support both tension and compression, and they buckle under sufficiently large compressive loads. When a drop of surfactant is introduced into the system, fracture networks develop in the rafts. The fracture process exhibits features observed in other elastic systems, such as crack kinking, crack branching, and crack arrest. Moreover, there is a clear coupling between the praft fracture and the diffusion of the surfactant on the surface and through the 'porous' liquid-particle monolayer. As such, one can draw analogies between this system and others where crack growth interacts with fluid flow or mass transport. The seminar will present recent work in modeling the diffusion of surfactant into particle raft systems and the resulting formation of fracture networks. We will present both discrete models that track the motion of individual particles, as well as a new continuum model for poro-chemo-elasticity. Results that reproduce some of the quantitative and qualitative aspects of recent experimental studies of these systems will also be shown.

public 01:14:39

Lucy Zhang : Modeling and Simulations of Fluid and Deformable-Structure Interactions in Bio-Mechanical Systems

  -   Applied Math and Analysis ( 142 Views )

Fluid-structure interactions exist in many aspects of our daily lives. Some biomedical engineering examples are blood flowing through a blood vessel and blood pumping in the heart. Fluid interacting with moving or deformable structures poses more numerical challenges for its complexity in dealing with transient and simultaneous interactions between the fluid and solid domains. To obtain stable, effective, and accurate solutions is not trivial. Traditional methods that are available in commercial software often generate numerical instabilities.

In this talk, a novel numerical solution technique, Immersed Finite Element Method (IFEM), is introduced for solving complex fluid-structure interaction problems in various engineering fields. The fluid and solid domains are fully coupled, thus yield accurate and stable solutions. The variables in the two domains are interpolated via a delta function that enables the use of non-uniform grids in the fluid domain, which allows the use of arbitrary geometry shapes and boundary conditions. This method extends the capabilities and flexibilities in solving various biomedical, traditional mechanical, and aerospace engineering problems with detailed and realistic mechanics analysis. Verification problems will be shown to validate the accuracy and effectiveness of this numerical approach. Several biomechanical problems will be presented: 1) blood flow in the left atrium and left atrial appendage which is the main source of blood in patients with atrial fibrillation. The function of the appendage is determined through fluid-structure interaction analysis, 2) examine blood cell and cell interactions under different flow shear rates. The formation of the cell aggregates can be predicted when given a physiologic shear rate.

public 01:17:07

Brian Mann : Nonlinear Energy Harvesting

  -   Nonlinear and Complex Systems ( 121 Views )

public 01:34:47

Zachary Bezemek : Interacting particle systems in multiscale environments: asymptotic analysis

  -   Probability ( 70 Views )

This talk is an overview of my thesis work, which consists of 3 projects exploring the effect of multiscale structure on a class of interacting particle systems called weakly interacting diffusions. In the absence of multiscale structure, we have a collection of N particles, with the dynamics of each being described by the solution to a stochastic differential equation (SDE) whose coefficients depend on that particle's state and the empirical measure of the full particle configuration. It is well known in this setting that as N approaches infinity, the particle system undergoes the ``propagation of chaos,'' and its corresponding sequence of empirical measures converges to the law of the solution to an associated McKean-Vlasov SDE. Meanwhile, in our multiscale setting, the coefficients of the SDEs may also depend on a process evolving on a timescale of order 1/\epsilon faster than the particles. As \epsilon approaches 0, the effect of the fast process on the particles' dynamics becomes deterministic via stochastic homogenization. We study the interplay between homogenization and the propagation of chaos via establishing large deviations and moderate deviations results for the multiscale particles' empirical measure in the combined limit as N approaches infinity and \epsilon approaches 0. Along the way, we derive rates of homogenization for slow-fast McKean-Vlasov SDEs.

public 01:02:33

Zack Bezemek : Large Deviations and Importance Sampling for Weakly Interacting Diffusions

  -   Probability ( 40 Views )

We consider an ensemble of N interacting particles modeled by a system of N stochastic differential equations (SDEs). The coefficients of the SDEs are taken to be such that as N approaches infinity, the system undergoes Kac’s propagation of chaos, and is well-approximated by the solution to a McKean-Vlasov Equation. Rare but possible deviations of the behavior of the particles from this limit may reflect a catastrophe, and computing the probability of such rare events is of high interest in many applications. In this talk, we design an importance sampling scheme which allows us to numerically compute statistics related to these rare events with high accuracy and efficiency for any N. Standard Monte Carlo methods behave exponentially poorly as N increases for such problems. Our scheme is based on subsolutions of a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) Equation on Wasserstein Space which arises in the theory of mean-field control. This HJB Equation is seen to be connected to the large deviations rate function for the empirical measure on the ensemble of particles. We identify conditions under which our scheme is provably asymptotically optimal in N in the sense of log-efficiency. We also provide evidence, both analytical and numerical, that with sufficient regularity of the solution to the HJB Equation, our scheme can have vanishingly small relative error as N increases.