## DEPARTMENTAL PHD THESIS EXAM-Geordie Richards

Everyone welcome.  Refreshments will be served in the Math Lounge before the exam.

Monday, May 28, 2012, 2:00 p.m., in BA 6183, 40 St. George Street

PhD Candidate:  Geordie Richards

Thesis Title:  Maximal-in-time behavior of deterministic and stochastic dispersive partial differential equations

www.math.toronto.edu/~grichard/GeordieRichards-Thesis.pdf

Thesis Abstract:

This thesis contributes towards the maximal-in-time well-posedness theory of three nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations (PDEs).  We are interested in questions that extend beyond the usual well-posedness theory: what is the ultimate fate of solutions?  How does Hamiltonian structure influence PDE dynamics?  How does randomness, within the PDE or the initial data, interact with well-posedness of the Cauchy problem?

The first topic of this thesis is the analysis of blow-up solutions to the elliptic-elliptic Davey-Stewartson system, which appears in the description of surface water waves.  We prove a mass concentration property for $H^1$-solutions, analogous to the one known for the $L^2$-critical nonlinear Schrodinger equation.  We also prove a mass concentration result for $L^2$-solutions.

The second topic of this thesis is the invariance of the Gibbs measure for the (gauge transformed) periodic quartic KdV equation.  The Gibbs measure is a probability measure supported in $H^s(T)$ for $s<1/2$, and the local-in-time solution to the quartic KdV cannot be obtained below $H^{1/2}(T)$ using the standard fixed point method.  We exhibit nonlinear smoothing when the initial data are randomized, and establish almost sure local well-posedness for the (gauge transformed) quartic KdV below $H^{1/2}(T)$.  Then, using the invariance of the Gibbs measure for the finite-dimensional system of ODEs given by projection onto the first N>0 modes of the trigonometric basis, we extend the local solutions of the (gauge transformed) quartic KdV to global solutions, and prove the invariance of the Gibbs measure under the flow.  Inverting the gauge, we establish almost sure global well-posedness of the (ungauged) periodic quartic KdV below $H^{1/2}(T)$.

The third topic of this thesis is well-posedness of the stochastic KdV-Burgers equation.  This equation is studied as a toy model for the stochastic Burgers equation, which appears in the description of a randomly growing interface.  We are interested in rigorously proving the invariance of white noise for the stochastic KdV-Burgers equation.  This thesis provides a result in this direction: after smoothing the additive noise (by a fractional derivative), we establish (almost sure) local well-posedness of the stochastic KdV-Burgers equation with white noise as initial data.  We also prove a global well-posedness result under an additional smoothing of the noise.