Related papers: Variational principle for the determination of uns…
Analytic methods to investigate periodic orbits in galactic potentials. To evaluate the quality of the approximation of periodic orbits in the logarithmic potential constructed using perturbation theory based on Hamiltonian normal forms.…
Lagrangian coherent structures (LCSs) are material surfaces that shape finite-time tracer patterns in flows with arbitrary time dependence. Depending on their deformation properties, elliptic and hyperbolic LCSs have been identified from…
Steady states of the Swift--Hohenberg equation are studied. For the associated four--dimensional ODE we prove that on the energy level $E=0$ two smooth branches of even periodic solutions are created through the saddle-node bifurcation. We…
Periodic orbits are important objects of discrete dynamical systems, but finding them is not always easy. We present a self-contained introductory account, aimed at non-experts, to prove their existence and study their stability using the…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
We show that a recently proposed numerical technique for the calculation of unstable periodic orbits in chaotic attractors is capable of finding the least unstable periodic orbits of any given order. This is achieved by introducing a…
Estimation of nonlinear dynamic models from data poses many challenges, including model instability and non-convexity of long-term simulation fidelity. Recently Lagrangian relaxation has been proposed as a method to approximate simulation…
We establish the existence of saddle points for a free boundary problem describing the two-dimensional free surface of a ferrofluid which undergoes normal field instability (also known as Rosensweig instability). The starting point consists…
We derive the dynamics of several rigid bodies of arbitrary shape in a 2-dimensional inviscid and incompressible fluid, whose vorticity field is given by point vortices. We adopt the idea of Vankerschaver et al. (2009) to derive the…
We propose a novel framework for approximating the statistical properties of turbulent flows by combining variational methods for the search of unstable periodic orbits with resolvent analysis for dimensionality reduction. Traditional…
In this paper we study the problem of designing periodic orbits for a special class of hybrid systems, namely mechanical systems with underactuated continuous dynamics and impulse events. We approach the problem by means of optimal control.…
Lagrangian coherent structures are effective barriers, sticky regions, that separate phase space regions of different dynamical behavior. The usual way to detect such structures is via finite-time Lyapunov exponents. We show that similar…
Dynamical control of excitable biological systems is often complicated by the difficult and unreliable task of pre-control identification of unstable periodic orbits (UPOs). Here we show that, for both chaotic and nonchaotic systems, UPOs…
We present a new formulation for numerically obtaining axisymmetric equilibrium structures of rotating stars in two spatial dimensions. With a view to apply it to the secular evolution of rotating stars, we base it on the Lagrangian…
We introduce a new stochastic algorithm to locate the index-1 saddle points of a function $V:\mathbb R^d \to \mathbb R$, with $d$ possibly large. This algorithm can be seen as an equivalent of the stochastic gradient descent which is a…
In this work, we consider optimal control problems for mechanical systems on vector spaces with fixed initial and free final state and a quadratic Lagrange term. Specifically, the dynamics is described by a second order ODE containing an…
By folding an autonomous system of rational equations in the plane to a scalar difference equation, we show that the rational system has coexisting periodic orbits of all possible periods as well as stable aperiodic orbits for certain…
Saddle points play important roles as the transition states of activated process in gradient system driven by energy functional. However, for the same energy functional, the saddle points, as well as other stationary points, are different…
A matrix method is formulated in a Lagrangian representation for the solution of the characteristic value problem governing modes of oscillation and instability in a collisionless stellar system. The underlying perturbation equations govern…
We address an iterative procedure that can be used to detect coarse-grained hyperbolic unstable equilibria (saddle points) of microscopic simulators when no equations at the macroscopic level are available. The scheme is based on the…