This volume contains the proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on "Asymptotic-induced Numerical Methods for Partial Differ ential Equations, Critical Parameters, and Domain Decomposition," held at Beaune (France), May 25-28, 1992. The purpose of the workshop was to stimulate the integration of asymp totic analysis, domain decomposition methods, and symbolic manipulation tools for the numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) with critical parameters. A workshop on the same topic was held at Argonne Na tional Laboratory in February 1990. (The proceedings were published under the title Asymptotic Analysis and the Numerical Solu.tion of Partial Differ ential Equations, Hans G. Kaper and Marc Garbey, eds., Lecture Notes in Pure and Applied Mathematics. Vol. 130, ·Marcel Dekker, Inc., New York, 1991.) In a sense, the present proceedings represent a progress report on the topic area. Comparing the two sets of proceedings, we see an increase in the quantity as well as the quality of the contributions. 110re research is being done in the topic area, and the interest covers serious, nontrivial problems. We are pleased with this outcome and expect to see even more advances in the next few years as the field progresses.

The Ginzburg-Landau equation has been applied widely in many fields. It describes the amplitude evolution of instability waves in a large variety of dissipative systems in fluid mechanics, which are close to criticality. In this chapter, we develop a local discontinuous Galerkin method to solve the nonlinear Ginzburg-Landau equation. The nonlinear Ginzburg-Landau problem has been expressed as a system of low-order differential equations. Moreover, we prove stability and optimal order of convergence OhN+1 for Ginzburg-Landau equation where h and N are the space step size and polynomial degree, respectively. The numerical experiments confirm the theoretical results of the method.

This book is concerned with the study in two dimensions of stationary solutions of uɛ of a complex valued Ginzburg-Landau equation involving a small parameter ɛ. Such problems are related to questions occurring in physics, e.g., phase transition phenomena in superconductors and superfluids. The parameter ɛ has a dimension of a length which is usually small. Thus, it is of great interest to study the asymptotics as ɛ tends to zero. One of the main results asserts that the limit u-star of minimizers uɛ exists. Moreover, u-star is smooth except at a finite number of points called defects or vortices in physics. The number of these defects is exactly the Brouwer degree – or winding number – of the boundary condition. Each singularity has degree one – or as physicists would say, vortices are quantized. The material presented in this book covers mostly original results by the authors. It assumes a moderate knowledge of nonlinear functional analysis, partial differential equations, and complex functions. This book is designed for researchers and graduate students alike, and can be used as a one-semester text. The present softcover reprint is designed to make this classic text available to a wider audience.

This handbook is volume II in a series collecting mathematical state-of-the-art surveys in the field of dynamical systems. Much of this field has developed from interactions with other areas of science, and this volume shows how concepts of dynamical systems further the understanding of mathematical issues that arise in applications. Although modeling issues are addressed, the central theme is the mathematically rigorous investigation of the resulting differential equations and their dynamic behavior. However, the authors and editors have made an effort to ensure readability on a non-technical level for mathematicians from other fields and for other scientists and engineers. The eighteen surveys collected here do not aspire to encyclopedic completeness, but present selected paradigms. The surveys are grouped into those emphasizing finite-dimensional methods, numerics, topological methods, and partial differential equations. Application areas include the dynamics of neural networks, fluid flows, nonlinear optics, and many others. While the survey articles can be read independently, they deeply share recurrent themes from dynamical systems. Attractors, bifurcations, center manifolds, dimension reduction, ergodicity, homoclinicity, hyperbolicity, invariant and inertial manifolds, normal forms, recurrence, shift dynamics, stability, to name just a few, are ubiquitous dynamical concepts throughout the articles.

This volume contains some of the lectures presented in June 1994 during the AMS-SIAM Summer Seminar at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. The goal of the seminar was to introduce participants to as many interesting and active applications of dynamical systems and probabilistic methods to problems in applied mathematics as possible. As a result, this book covers a great deal of ground. Nevertheless, the pedagogical orientation of the lectures has been retained, and therefore the book will serve as an ideal introduction to these varied and interesting topics.