Mircea Petrache. PUC Chile
Energy, Optimal Transport and Best Polarization asymptotics, for large configurations of points
Auditorio Ninoslav Bralic
Abstract:
Large systems of points which optimize variational principles and are conjectured to form lattice-like configurations, appear in several fields of science, such as Material Science, Signal Processing, Geometric Number Theory, Superconductivity, etc.
For a system of N points, the characterization of "best" configurations at specific low values of N usually relies on ad-hoc methods, and the spatial patterns given by optimum configurations for small N are mysterious, and unknown except for very small N. On the other hand, as the number of points N tends to infinity, crystallization is often experimentally/numerically observed, i.e. the "best" configurations become closer and closer to special lattices. Rigorous proofs of this by classical methods are in all but a few interesting cases missing, and the exponential complexity of the configuration spaces form a fundamental obstacle. Even in simplified situations, proofs rely on non-classical techniques that work across classical boundaries between fields of mathematics, such as in recent work of Viazovska.
I will present three model-problems: 1) the basic energy-minimization and packing problems, based on pairwise interactions, 2) an optimal transport problem coming from computational quantum mechanics, and 3) the so-called Chebyshev, or best polarization, problem. The talk is partly based on joint work S.Serfaty, C.Cotar, D.Hardin and E.Saff.