The non-parametric estimation of a non-linear reaction term in a semi-linear parabolic stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) is discussed. The estimation error can be bounded in terms of the diffusivity and the noise level. The estimator is easily computable and consistent under general assumptions due to the asymptotic spatial ergodicity of the SPDE as both the diffusivity and the noise level tend to zero. If the SPDE is driven by space-time white noise, a central limit theorem for the estimation error and minimax-optimality of the convergence rate are obtained. The analysis of the estimation error requires the control of spatial averages of non-linear transformations of the SPDE, and combines the Clark-Ocone formula from Malliavin calculus with the Markovianity of the SPDE. In contrast to previous results on the convergence of spatial averages, the obtained variance bound is uniform in the Lipschitz-constant of the transformation. Additionally, new upper and lower Gaussian bounds for the marginal (Lebesgue-) densities of the SPDE are required and derived.
We consider the coupled system of the Landau--Lifshitz--Gilbert equation and the conservation of linear momentum law to describe magnetic processes in ferromagnetic materials including magnetoelastic effects in the small-strain regime. For this nonlinear system of time-dependent partial differential equations, we present a decoupled integrator based on first-order finite elements in space and an implicit one-step method in time. We prove unconditional convergence of the sequence of discrete approximations towards a weak solution of the system as the mesh size and the time-step size go to zero. Compared to previous numerical works on this problem, for our method, we prove a discrete energy law that mimics that of the continuous problem and, passing to the limit, yields an energy inequality satisfied by weak solutions. Moreover, our method does not employ a nodal projection to impose the unit length constraint on the discrete magnetisation, so that the stability of the method does not require weakly acute meshes. Furthermore, our integrator and its analysis hold for a more general setting, including body forces and traction, as well as a more general representation of the magnetostrain. Numerical experiments underpin the theory and showcase the applicability of the scheme for the simulation of the dynamical processes involving magnetoelastic materials at submicrometer length scales.
We investigate quantum phase transitions in the transverse field Ising chain with algebraically decaying long-range antiferromagnetic interactions by using the variational Monte Carlo method with the restricted Boltzmann machine being employed as a trial wave function ansatz. In the finite-size scaling analysis with the order parameter and the second R\'enyi entropy, we find that the central charge deviates from 1/2 at a small decay exponent $\alpha_\mathrm{LR}$ in contrast to the critical exponents staying very close to the short-range (SR) Ising values regardless of $\alpha_\mathrm{LR}$ examined, supporting the previously proposed scenario of conformal invariance breakdown. To identify the threshold of the Ising universality and the conformal symmetry, we perform two additional tests for the universal Binder ratio and the conformal field theory (CFT) description of the correlation function. It turns out that both indicate a noticeable deviation from the SR Ising class at $\alpha_\mathrm{LR} < 2$. However, a closer look at the scaled correlation function for $\alpha_\mathrm{LR} \ge 2$ shows a gradual change from the asymptotic line of the CFT verified at $\alpha_\mathrm{LR} = 3$, providing a rough estimate of the threshold being in the range of $2 \lesssim \alpha_\mathrm{LR} < 3$.
This paper develops and benchmarks an immersed peridynamics method to simulate the deformation, damage, and failure of hyperelastic materials within a fluid-structure interaction framework. The immersed peridynamics method describes an incompressible structure immersed in a viscous incompressible fluid. It expresses the momentum equation and incompressibility constraint in Eulerian form, and it describes the structural motion and resultant forces in Lagrangian form. Coupling between Eulerian and Lagrangian variables is achieved by integral transforms with Dirac delta function kernels, as in standard immersed boundary methods. The major difference between our approach and conventional immersed boundary methods is that we use peridynamics, instead of classical continuum mechanics, to determine the structural forces. We focus on non-ordinary state-based peridynamic material descriptions that allow us to use a constitutive correspondence framework that can leverage well characterized nonlinear constitutive models of soft materials. The convergence and accuracy of our approach are compared to both conventional and immersed finite element methods using widely used benchmark problems of nonlinear incompressible elasticity. We demonstrate that the immersed peridynamics method yields comparable accuracy with similar numbers of structural degrees of freedom for several choices of the size of the peridynamic horizon. We also demonstrate that the method can generate grid-converged simulations of fluid-driven material damage growth, crack formation and propagation, and rupture under large deformations.
One of the central quantities of probabilistic seismic risk assessment studies is the fragility curve, which represents the probability of failure of a mechanical structure conditional to a scalar measure derived from the seismic ground motion. Estimating such curves is a difficult task because for most structures of interest, few data are available. For this reason, a wide range of the methods of the literature rely on a parametric log-normal model. Bayesian approaches allow for efficient learning of the model parameters. However, the choice of the prior distribution has a non-negligible influence on the posterior distribution, and therefore on any resulting estimate. We propose a thorough study of this parametric Bayesian estimation problem when the data are binary (i.e. data indicate the state of the structure, failure or non-failure). Using the reference prior theory as a support, we suggest an objective approach for the prior choice. This approach leads to the Jeffreys' prior which is explicitly derived for this problem for the first time. The posterior distribution is proven to be proper (i.e. it integrates to unity) with Jeffreys' prior and improper with some classical priors from the literature. The posterior distribution with Jeffreys' prior is also shown to vanish at the boundaries of the parameter domain, so sampling of the posterior distribution of the parameters does not produce anomalously small or large values, which in turn does not produce degenerate fragility curves such as unit step functions. The numerical results on three different case studies illustrate these theoretical predictions.
A standard approach to solve ordinary differential equations, when they describe dynamical systems, is to adopt a Runge-Kutta or related scheme. Such schemes, however, are not applicable to the large class of equations which do not constitute dynamical systems. In several physical systems, we encounter integro-differential equations with memory terms where the time derivative of a state variable at a given time depends on all past states of the system. Secondly, there are equations whose solutions do not have well-defined Taylor series expansion. The Maxey-Riley-Gatignol equation, which describes the dynamics of an inertial particle in nonuniform and unsteady flow, displays both challenges. We use it as a test bed to address the questions we raise, but our method may be applied to all equations of this class. We show that the Maxey-Riley-Gatignol equation can be embedded into an extended Markovian system which is constructed by introducing a new dynamical co-evolving state variable that encodes memory of past states. We develop a Runge-Kutta algorithm for the resultant Markovian system. The form of the kernels involved in deriving the Runge-Kutta scheme necessitates the use of an expansion in powers of $t^{1/2}$. Our approach naturally inherits the benefits of standard time-integrators, namely a constant memory storage cost, a linear growth of operational effort with simulation time, and the ability to restart a simulation with the final state as the new initial condition.
This study focuses on the presence of (multi)fractal structures in confined hadronic matter through the momentum distributions of mesons produced in proton-proton collisions between 23 GeV and 63 GeV. The analysis demonstrates that the $q$-exponential behaviour of the particle momentum distributions is consistent with fractal characteristics, exhibiting fractal structures in confined hadronic matter with features similar to those observed in the deconfined quark-gluon plasma (QGP) regime. Furthermore, the systematic analysis of meson production in hadronic collisions at energies below 1 TeV suggests that specific fractal parameters are universal, independently of confinement or deconfinement, while others may be influenced by the quark content of the produced meson. These results pave the way for further research exploring the implications of fractal structures on various physical distributions and offer insights into the nature of the phase transition between confined and deconfined regimes.
This paper presents the error analysis of numerical methods on graded meshes for stochastic Volterra equations with weakly singular kernels. We first prove a novel regularity estimate for the exact solution via analyzing the associated convolution structure. This reveals that the exact solution exhibits an initial singularity in the sense that its H\"older continuous exponent on any neighborhood of $t=0$ is lower than that on every compact subset of $(0,T]$. Motivated by the initial singularity, we then construct the Euler--Maruyama method, fast Euler--Maruyama method, and Milstein method based on graded meshes. By establishing their pointwise-in-time error estimates, we give the grading exponents of meshes to attain the optimal uniform-in-time convergence orders, where the convergence orders improve those of the uniform mesh case. Numerical experiments are finally reported to confirm the sharpness of theoretical findings.
We propose a new randomized method for solving systems of nonlinear equations, which can find sparse solutions or solutions under certain simple constraints. The scheme only takes gradients of component functions and uses Bregman projections onto the solution space of a Newton equation. In the special case of euclidean projections, the method is known as nonlinear Kaczmarz method. Furthermore, if the component functions are nonnegative, we are in the setting of optimization under the interpolation assumption and the method reduces to SGD with the recently proposed stochastic Polyak step size. For general Bregman projections, our method is a stochastic mirror descent with a novel adaptive step size. We prove that in the convex setting each iteration of our method results in a smaller Bregman distance to exact solutions as compared to the standard Polyak step. Our generalization to Bregman projections comes with the price that a convex one-dimensional optimization problem needs to be solved in each iteration. This can typically be done with globalized Newton iterations. Convergence is proved in two classical settings of nonlinearity: for convex nonnegative functions and locally for functions which fulfill the tangential cone condition. Finally, we show examples in which the proposed method outperforms similar methods with the same memory requirements.
Recently, several algorithms have been proposed for decomposing reactive synthesis specifications into independent and simpler sub-specifications. Being inspired by one of the approaches, developed by Antonio Iannopollo (2018), who designed the so-called (DC) algorithm, we present here our solution that takes his ideas further and provides mathematical formalisation of the strategy behind DC. We rigorously define the main notions involved in the algorithm, explain the technique, and demonstrate its application on examples. The core technique of DC is based on the detection of independent variables in linear temporal logic formulae by exploiting the power and efficiency of a model checker. Although the DC algorithm is sound, it is not complete, as its author already pointed out. In this paper, we provide a counterexample that shows this fact and propose relevant changes to adapt the original DC strategy to ensure its correctness. The modification of DC and the detailed proof of its soundness and completeness are the main contributions of this work.
We present a multigrid algorithm to solve efficiently the large saddle-point systems of equations that typically arise in PDE-constrained optimization under uncertainty. The algorithm is based on a collective smoother that at each iteration sweeps over the nodes of the computational mesh, and solves a reduced saddle-point system whose size depends on the number $N$ of samples used to discretized the probability space. We show that this reduced system can be solved with optimal $O(N)$ complexity. We test the multigrid method on three problems: a linear-quadratic problem for which the multigrid method is used to solve directly the linear optimality system; a nonsmooth problem with box constraints and $L^1$-norm penalization on the control, in which the multigrid scheme is used within a semismooth Newton iteration; a risk-adverse problem with the smoothed CVaR risk measure where the multigrid method is called within a preconditioned Newton iteration. In all cases, the multigrid algorithm exhibits very good performances and robustness with respect to all parameters of interest.