Expected distances on homogeneous manifolds and notes on pattern formation
Date
2023
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Abstract
Flag manifolds are generalizations of projective spaces and other Grassmannians: they parametrize flags, which are nested sequences of subspaces in a given vector space. These are important objects in algebraic and differential geometry, but are also increasingly being used in data science, where many types of data are properly understood as subspaces rather than vectors. In Chapter 1 of this dissertation, we discuss partially oriented flag manifolds, which parametrize flags in which some of the subspaces may be endowed with an orientation. We compute the expected distance between random points on some low-dimensional examples, which we view as a statistical baseline against which to compare the distances between particular partially oriented flags coming from geometry or data. Lens spaces are a family of manifolds that have been a source of many interesting phenomena in topology and differential geometry. Their concrete construction, as quotients of odd-dimensional spheres by a free linear action of a finite cyclic group, allows a deeper analysis of their structure. In Chapter 2, we consider the problem of moments for the distance function between randomly selected pairs of points on homogeneous three-dimensional lens spaces. We give a derivation of a recursion relation for the moments, a formula for the kth moment, and a formula for the moment generating function, as well as an explicit formula for the volume of balls of all radii in these lens spaces. Motivated by previous results showing that the addition of a linear dispersive term to the two-dimensional Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation has a dramatic effect on the pattern formation, we study the Swift-Hohenberg equation with an added linear dispersive term, the dispersive Swift-Hohenberg equation (DSHE) in Chapter 3. The DSHE produces stripe patterns with spatially extended defects that we call seams. A seam is defined to be a dislocation that is smeared out along a line segment that is obliquely oriented relative to an axis of reflectional symmetry. In contrast to the dispersive Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, the DSHE has a narrow band of unstable wavelengths close to an instability threshold. This allows for analytical progress to be made. We show that the amplitude equation for the DSHE close to threshold is a special case of the anisotropic complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (ACGLE) and that seams in the DSHE correspond to spiral waves in the ACGLE. Seam defects and the corresponding spiral waves tend to organize themselves into chains, and we obtain formulas for the velocity of the spiral wave cores and for the spacing between them. In the limit of strong dispersion, a perturbative analysis yields a relationship between the amplitude and wavelength of a stripe pattern and its propagation velocity. Numerical integrations of the ACGLE and the DSHE confirm these analytical results. Chapter 4 explores the measurement and characterization of order in non-equilibrium pattern forming systems. The study focuses on the use of topological measures of order, via persistent homology and the Wasserstein metric. We investigate the quantification of order with respect to ideal lattice patterns and demonstrate the effectiveness of the introduced measures of order in analyzing imperfect three-dimensional patterns and their time evolution. The paper provides valuable insights into the complex pattern formation and contributes to the understanding of order in three dimensions.