Peter Olver

Fractalization, Quantization, and Revivals in Dispersive Systems

Dispersive quantization, also known as the Talbot effect, describes the remarkable evolution, through spatially periodic linear dispersion, of rough initial data, producing fractal, non-differentiable profiles at irrational times and, for asymptotically polynomial dispersion relations, quantized structures and revivals at rational times. Such phenomena have been observed in dispersive waves, optics, and quantum mechanics, and have intriguing connections with number theoretic exponential sums. I will survey results on the analysis and numerics for linear and nonlinear dispersive wave models, both integrable and non-integrable, as well as integro-differential equations modeling interface dynamics, and, time permitting, Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou systems of coupled nonlinear oscillators.