Event Details

Spatially Localized Structures: Experiments, Theory and Numerics

In this colloquium I will introduce the notion of a spatially localized structure and illustrate the ubiquity of such structures in natural environments. Figure 1 shows an example of localized buckling of a cylinder under a compressive load, while Figure 2 shows an oscillating localized structure called an oscillon. In the talk I will outline how we think about such structures, both mathematically and physically, and show numerical computations of such structures in several situations arising in fluid mechanics, including convection and shear flow instability.