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In this paper we consider the coin billiards introduced by M. Bialy. It is a family of maps of the annulus $\mathbb A = \mathbb T \times (0,\pi)$ given by the composition of the classical billiard map on a convex planar table $\Gamma$ with the geodesic flow on the lateral surface of a cylinder (coin) of given height having as bases two copies of $\Gamma$. We prove the following three main theorems: in two different scenarios (when the height of the coin is small, or when the coin is near-circular) there is a family of KAM curves close to, but not accumulating on, the boundary $\partial \mathbb A$; for any non-circular coin, if the height of the coin is sufficiently large, there is a neighbourhood of $\partial \mathbb A$ through which there passes no invariant essential curve; for many noncircular coins, there are Birkhoff zones of instability. These results provide partial answers to questions of Bialy. Finally, we describe the results of some numerical experiments on the elliptical coin billiard.

Clay minerals are abundant natural materials used widely in coatings, construction materials, ceramics, as well as being a component of drilling fluids. Here, we present the effect of steady and oscillatory preshear on organophilic modified clay gels in synthetic oil. Both platelet and needle-like particles are used as viscosifiers in drilling fluid formulations. For both particles the plateau modulus exhibits a similar concentration dependence, G_P ~ c^3.9, whereas the yield strain is {\gamma}_y ~ c^(-1) for the platelets and {\gamma}_y ~ c^-1.7 for the needles. Mixtures of the two follow an intermediate behavior: at low concentrations their elasticity and yield strain follows that of needle particles while at higher concentrations it exhibits a weaker power law dependence. Furthermore, upon varying the preshear history, the gel viscoelastic properties can be significantly tuned. At lower (higher) clay concentrations, preshear at specific oscillatory strain amplitudes or steady shear rates, may induce a hardening (softening) of the dispersions and, at all concentrations, a lowering of the shear strain. Hence, in needle dispersions preshear resulted in changes in the volume fraction dependence of the elastic modulus from G_P ~ c^3.9 to G_P ~ c^2.5 and of the yield strain from {\gamma}_y ~ c^-1.7 to {\gamma}_y ~ c^-1. However, small angle X-ray scattering showed not much structural changes, within the q-range covered. Our findings indicate ways to design colloidal organoclay dispersions with a mechanical response that can be tuned at will.

We study billiards in domains enclosed by circular polygons. These are closed $C^1$ strictly convex curves formed by finitely many circular arcs. We prove the existence of a set in phase space, corresponding to generic sliding trajectories close enough to the boundary of the domain, in which the return billiard dynamics is semiconjugate to a transitive subshift on infinitely many symbols that contains the full $N$-shift as a topological factor for any $N \in \mathbb{N}$, so it has infinite topological entropy. We prove the existence of uncountably many asymptotic generic sliding trajectories approaching the boundary with optimal uniform linear speed, give an explicit exponentially big (in $q$) lower bound on the number of $q$-periodic trajectories as $q \to \infty$, and present an unusual property of the length spectrum. Our proofs are entirely analytical., Comment: 42 pages, 7 figures

Any toric flip naturally induces an equivalence between the associated categories of equivariant reflexive sheaves, and we investigate how slope stability behaves through this functor. On one hand, for a fixed toric sheaf, and natural polarisations that make the exceptional loci small, we provide a simple numerical criterion that characterizes when slope stability is preserved through the flip. On the other hand, for a given flip, we introduce full subcategories of logarithmic toric sheaves and characterize when polystability is preserved for all toric sheaves in those subcategories at once., Comment: 21 pages. Final version, to appear in EpiGA

We construct $C^{\infty}$ time-periodic fluctuating surfaces in $\mathbb{R}^3$ such that the corresponding nonautonomous geodesic flow has orbits along which the energy, and thus the speed, goes to infinity.

We consider a sufficiently smooth semi-stable holomorphic vector bundle over a compact K\"ahler manifold. Assuming the automorphism group of its graded object to be abelian, we provide a semialgebraic decomposition of a neighbourhood of the polarisation in the K\"ahler cone into chambers characterising (in)stability. For a path in a stable chamber converging to the initial polarisation, we show that the associated HYM connections converge to an HYM connection on the graded object., Comment: 15 pages, comments very welcome. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2301.00525

We study the G$_2$-instanton condition for a family of metric connections arisen from the characteristic connection, on $7$-dimensional $2$-step nilpotent Lie groups with left-invariant coclosed G$_2$-structures. According to the dimension of the commutator subgroup, we establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the connection to be an instanton, in terms of the torsion of the G$_2$-structure, the torsion of the connection and the Lie group structure.Moreover, we show that in our setup, G$_2$-instantons define a naturally reductive structure on the simply connected $2$-step nilpotent Lie group with left-invariant Riemannian metric. Taking quotient by lattices, one obtains G$_2$-instantons on compact nilmanifolds., Comment: 37 pages. Comments are welcome. v2: Minor changes, references added

Flow-Induced Self-Assembly (FISA) is the phenomena of particle chaining in viscoelastic fluids while experiencing shear flow. FISA has a large number of applications across many fields including material science, food processing and biomedical engineering. Nonetheless, this phenomena is currently not fully understood and little has been done in literature so far to investigate the possible effects of the shear-induced elastic instability. In this work, a bespoke cone and plate shear cell is used to provide new insights on the FISA dynamics. In particular, we have fine tuned the applied shear rates to investigate the chaining phenomenon of micron-sized spherical particles suspended into a viscoelastic fluid characterised by a distinct onset of elastic instability. This has allowed us to reveal three phenomena never reported in literature before, i.e.: (I) the onset of the elastic instability is strongly correlated with an enhancement of FISA; (II) particle chains break apart when a constant shear is applied for `sufficiently' long-time (i.e. much longer than the fluids' longest relaxation time). This latter point correlates well with the outcomes of parallel superposition shear measurements, which (III) reveal a fading of the elastic component of the suspending fluid during continuous shear flows.

A longstanding belief has been that the semimajor axes, in the Newtonian planetary problem, are stable. In the course of the XIX century, Laplace, Lagrange and others gave stronger and stronger arguments in this direction, thus culminating in what has commonly been referred to as the first Laplace-Lagrange stability theorem. In the problem with 3 planets, we prove the existence of orbits along which the semimajor axis of the outer planet undergoes large random variations thus disproving the theorem of Laplace-Lagrange. The time of instability varies as a negative power of the masses of the planets. The orbits we have found fall outside the scope of the theory of Nekhoroshev-Niederman because they are not confined by the conservation of angular momentum and because the Hamiltonian is not (uniformly) convex with respect to the Keplerian actions., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2210.11311

We investigate hermitian Yang--Mills connections for pullback vector bundles on blow-ups of K\"ahler manifolds along submanifolds. Under some mild asumptions on the graded object of a simple and semi-stable vector bundle, we provide a necessary and sufficent numerical criterion for the pullback bundle to admit a sequence of hermitian Yang--Mills connections for polarisations that make the exceptional divisor sufficiently small, and show that those connections converge to the pulled back hermitian Yang-Mills connection of the graded object., Comment: 21 pages. Previous Lemma 2.5 was wrong and has been fixed. This required a new approach. Sections 4 and 5 are new, and replace former Sections 3-5. New hypothesis in the main statement regarding the graded object and the codimension of the blown-up locus

Poincar\'e's work more than one century ago, or Laskar's numerical simulations from the 1990's on, have irrevocably impaired the long-held belief that the Solar System should be stable. But mathematical mechanisms explaining this instability have remained mysterious. In 1968, Arnold conjectured the existence of "Arnold diffusion" in celestial mechanics. We prove Arnold's conjecture in the planetary spatial $4$-body problem as well as in the corresponding hierarchical problem (where the bodies are increasingly separated), and show that this diffusion leads, on a long time interval, to some large-scale instability. Along the diffusive orbits, the mutual inclination of the two inner planets is close to $\pi/2$, which hints at why even marginal stability in planetary systems may exist only when inner planets are not inclined. More precisely, consider the normalised angular momentum of the second planet, obtained by rescaling the angular momentum by the square root of its semimajor axis and by an adequate mass factor (its direction and norm give the plane of revolution and the eccentricity of the second planet). It is a vector of the unit $3$-ball. We show that any finite sequence in this ball may be realised, up to an arbitrary precision, as a sequence of values of the normalised angular momentum in the $4$-body problem. For example, the second planet may flip from prograde nearly horizontal revolutions to retrograde ones. As a consequence of the proof, the non-recurrent set of any finite-order secular normal form accumulates on circular motions -- a weak form of a celebrated conjecture of Herman.

Consider a symplectic map which possesses a normally hyperbolic invariant manifold of any even dimension with transverse homoclinic channels. We develop a topological shadowing argument to prove the existence of Arnold diffusion along the invariant manifold, shadowing some iterations of the inner dynamics carried by the invariant manifold and the outer dynamics induced by the stable and unstable foliations. In doing so, we generalise an idea of Gidea and de la Llave in [26], based on the method of correctly aligned windows and a so-called transversality-torsion argument. Our proof permits that the dynamics on the invariant manifold satisfy only a non-uniform twist condition, and, most importantly for applications, that the splitting of separatrices be small in certain directions and thus the associated drift in actions very slow; diffusion occurs in the directions of the manifold having non-small splitting. Furthermore we provide estimates for the diffusion time., Comment: 37 pages, 5 figures

We consider $G_2$-structures with torsion coupled with $G_2$-instantons, on a compact $7$-dimensional manifold. The coupling is via an equation for $4$-forms which appears in supergravity and generalized geometry, known as the Bianchi identity. First studied by Friedrich and Ivanov, the resulting system of partial differential equations describes compactifications of the heterotic string to three dimensions, and is often referred to as the $G_2$-Strominger system. We study the moduli space of solutions and prove that the space of infinitesimal deformations, modulo automorphisms, is finite dimensional. We also provide a new family of solutions to this system, on $T^3$-bundles over $K3$ surfaces and for infinitely many different instanton bundles, adapting a construction of Fu-Yau and the second named author. In particular, we exhibit the first examples of $T$-dual solutions for this system of equations., Comment: This article subsumes the previous submission arXiv:1607.01219

Rayleigh-B\'enard convection (RBC) is a fundamental problem of fluid dynamics, with many applications to geophysical, astrophysical, and industrial flows. Understanding RBC at parameter regimes of interest requires complex physical or numerical experiments. Numerical simulations require large amounts of computational resources; in order to more efficiently use the large numbers of processors now available in large high performance computing clusters, novel parallelisation strategies are required. To this end, we investigate the performance of the parallel-in-time algorithm Parareal when used in numerical simulations of RBC. We present the first parallel-in-time speedups for RBC simulations at finite Prandtl number. We also investigate the problem of convergence of Parareal with respect to to statistical numerical quantities, such as the Nusselt number, and discuss the importance of reliable online stopping criteria in these cases.

For (X,L) a polarized toric variety and G a torus of automorphisms of (X,L), denote by Y the GIT quotient X/G. We define a family of fully faithful functors from the category of torus equivariant reflexive sheaves on Y to the category of torus equivariant reflexive sheaves on X. We show, under a genericity assumption on G, that slope stability is preserved by these functors if and only if the pair ((X, L), G) satisfies a combinatorial criterion. As an application, when (X,L) is a polarized toric orbifold of dimension n, we relate stable equivariant reflexive sheaves on (X, L) to stable equivariant reflexive sheaves on certain (n-1)-dimensional weighted projective spaces., Comment: 28 pages, final version. More details on the construction of the functors, an extra example added in Section 5.2 (rank 2 stable reflexive but not locally free sheaf on (P^1)^3). To appear in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Section A: Mathematics

Consider the geodesic flow on a real-analytic closed hypersurface $M$ of $\mathbb{R}^n$, equipped with the standard Euclidean metric. The flow is entirely determined by the manifold and the Riemannian metric. Typically, geodesic flows are perturbed by varying the metric. In the present paper, however, only the Euclidean metric is used, and instead the manifold $M$ is perturbed. In this context, analogues of the following theorems are proved: the bumpy metric theorem; a theorem of Klingenberg and Takens regarding generic properties of $k$-jets of Poincar\'e maps along geodesics; and the Kupka-Smale theorem. Moreover, the proofs presented here are valid in the real-analytic topology. Together, these results imply the following two main theorems: if $M$ is a real-analytic closed hypersurface in $\mathbb{R}^n$ (with $n \geq 3$) on which the geodesic flow with respect to the Euclidean metric has a nonhyperbolic periodic orbit, then $C^{\omega}$-generically the geodesic flow on $M$ with respect to the Euclidean metric has a hyperbolic periodic orbit with a transverse homoclinic orbit; and there is a $C^{\omega}$-open and dense set of real-analytic, closed, and strictly convex surfaces $M$ in $\mathbb{R}^3$ on which the geodesic flow with respect to the Euclidean metric has a hyperbolic periodic orbit with a transverse homoclinic orbit. The methods used here also apply to the classical setting of perturbations of metrics on a Riemannian manifold to obtain real-analytic versions of these theorems in that case. These are among the first perturbation-theoretic results for real-analytic geodesic flows., Comment: Published in Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems A

Consider billiard dynamics in a strictly convex domain, and consider a trajectory that begins with the velocity vector making a small positive angle with the boundary. Lazutkin proved that in two dimensions, it is impossible for this angle to tend to zero along trajectories. We prove that such trajectories can exist in higher dimensions. Namely, using the geometric techniques of Arnold diffusion, we show that in three or more dimensions, assuming the geodesic flow on the boundary of the domain has a hyperbolic periodic orbit and a transverse homoclinic, the existence of trajectories asymptotically approaching the billiard boundary is a generic phenomenon in the real-analytic topology., Comment: 69 pages; includes proof of exact symplecticity of modified scattering maps

In this paper we study ${\rm Spin}(7)$-instantons on asymptotically conical ${\rm Spin}(7)$-orbifolds (and manifolds) obtained by filling in certain squashed $3$-Sasakian $7$-manifolds. We construct a $1$-parameter family of explicit ${\rm Spin}(7)$-instantons. Taking the parameter to infinity, the family (a) bubbles off an ASD connection in directions transverse to a certain Cayley submanifold $Z$, (b) away from $Z$ smoothly converges to a limit ${\rm Spin}(7)$-instanton that extends across $Z$ onto a topologically distinct bundle, (c) satisfies an energy conservation law for the instantons and the bubbles concentrated on $Z$, and (d) determines a Fueter section, in the sense of Donaldson and Segal, Haydys and Walpuski., Comment: 22 pages, 1 figure

We study theoretically pressure driven planar channel flow of shear thinning viscoelastic fluids. Combining linear stability analysis and full nonlinear simulation, we study the instability of an initially one-dimensional base state to the growth of two-dimensional perturbations with wavevector in the flow direction. We do so within three widely used constitutive models: the microscopically motivated Rolie-Poly model, and the phenomenological Johnson-Segalman and White-Metzner models. In each model, we find instability when the degree of shear thinning exceeds some level characterised by the logarithmic slope of the flow curve at its shallowest point. Specifically, we find instability for $n

The precise mechanisms responsible for the natural dynamos in the Earth and Sun are still not fully understood. Numerical simulations of natural dynamos are extremely computationally intensive, and are carried out in parameter regimes many orders of magnitude away from real conditions. Parallelization in space is a common strategy to speed up simulations on high performance computers, but eventually hits a scaling limit. Additional directions of parallelization are desirable to utilise the high number of processor cores now available. Parallel-in-time methods can deliver speed up in addition to that offered by spatial partitioning but have not yet been applied to dynamo simulations. This paper investigates the feasibility of using the parallel-in-time algorithm Parareal to speed up initial value problem simulations of the kinematic dynamo, using the open source Dedalus spectral solver. Both the time independent Roberts and time dependent Galloway-Proctor 2.5D dynamos are investigated over a range of magnetic Reynolds numbers. Speed ups beyond those possible from spatial parallelization are found in both cases. Results for the Galloway-Proctor flow are promising, with Parareal efficiency found to be close to 0.3. Roberts flow results are less efficient, but Parareal still shows some speed up over spatial parallelization alone. Parallel in space and time speed ups of $\sim300$ were found for 1600 cores for the Galloway-Proctor flow, with total parallel efficiency of $\sim0.16$.