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In this paper we prove a large deviation principle (LDP) for the empirical measure of a general system of mean-field interacting diffusions with singular drift (as the number of particles tends to infinity) and show convergence to the associated McKean-Vlasov equation. Along the way, we prove an extended version of the Varadhan Integral Lemma for a discontinuous change of measure and subsequently an LDP for Gibbs and Gibbs-like measures with singular potentials.

The highly heterogeneous and biologically active continental shelf-seas are important components of the oceanic carbon sink. Carbon rich water from shelf-seas is exported at depth to the open ocean, a process known as the continental shelf pump, with open-ocean surface water moving (transported) onto the shelf driving the export at depth. Existing methods to study shelf-wide exchange focus on the wind or geostrophic currents, often ignoring their combined effect, spatial heterogeniety or any other ageostrophic components. Here we investigate the influence that wind, wave and current interactions can have on surface transport and carbon export across continental shelves. Using a 21 year global re-analysis dataset we confirm that geostrophic and wind driven Ekman processes are important for the transport of water onto shelf seas; but the dominance of each is location and season dependent. A global wave model re-analysis shows that one type of ageostrophic flow, Stokes drift due to waves, can also be significant. A regional case study using two submesocale model simulations identifies that up to 100% of the cross-shelf surface flow in European seas can be due to ageostrophic components. Using these results and grouping shelf-seas based on their observed carbon accumulation rates shows that differences in rates are consistent with imbalances between the processes driving atmosphere-ocean exchange at the surface and those driving carbon export at depth. Therefore expected future changes in wind and wave climate support the need to monitor cross-shelf transport and the size of the continental shelf-sea carbon pump. The results presented show that the Sea Surface Kinematics Multiscale monitoring satellite mission (SKIM), will be capable of providing measurements of the total cross-shelf current, which are now needed to enable routine monitoring of the global continental shelf-sea carbon pump., Comment: 22 pages, 3 tables, 5 figures

In this paper we study a class of fast geometric image inpainting methods based on the idea of filling the inpainting domain in successive shells from its boundary inwards. Image pixels are filled by assigning them a color equal to a weighted average of their already filled neighbors. However, there is flexibility in terms of the order in which pixels are filled, the weights used for averaging, and the neighborhood that is averaged over. Varying these degrees of freedom leads to different algorithms, and indeed the literature contains several methods falling into this general class. All of them are very fast, but at the same time all of them leave undesirable artifacts such as "kinking" (bending) or blurring of extrapolated isophotes. Our objective in this paper is to build a theoretical model, based on a continuum limit and a connection to stopped random walks, in order to understand why these artifacts occur and what, if anything, can be done about them. At the same time, we consider a semi-implicit extension in which pixels in a given shell are solved for simultaneously by solving a linear system. We prove (within the continuum limit) that this extension is able to completely eliminate kinking artifacts, which we also prove must always be present in the direct method. Although our analysis makes the strong assumption of a square inpainting domain, it makes weak smoothness assumptions and is thus applicable to the low regularity inherent in images.

In part I we considered the problem of convergence to a saddle point of a concave-convex function via gradient dynamics and an exact characterization was given to their asymptotic behaviour. In part II we consider a general class of subgradient dynamics that provide a restriction in an arbitrary convex domain. We show that despite the nonlinear and non-smooth character of these dynamics their $\omega$-limit set is comprised of solutions to only linear ODEs. In particular, we show that the latter are solutions to subgradient dynamics on affine subspaces which is a smooth class of dynamics the asymptotic properties of which have been exactly characterized in part I. Various convergence criteria are formulated using these results and several examples and applications are also discussed throughout the manuscript.

We consider the problem of convergence to a saddle point of a concave-convex function via gradient dynamics. Since first introduced by Arrow, Hurwicz and Uzawa in [1] such dynamics have been extensively used in diverse areas, there are, however, features that render their analysis non trivial. These include the lack of convergence guarantees when the function considered is not strictly concave-convex and also the non-smoothness of subgradient dynamics. Our aim in this two part paper is to provide an explicit characterization to the asymptotic behaviour of general gradient and subgradient dynamics applied to a general concave-convex function. We show that despite the nonlinearity and non-smoothness of these dynamics their $\omega$-limit set is comprised of trajectories that solve only explicit linear ODEs that are characterized within the paper. More precisely, in Part I an exact characterization is provided to the asymptotic behaviour of unconstrained gradient dynamics. We also show that when convergence to a saddle point is not guaranteed then the system behaviour can be problematic, with arbitrarily small noise leading to an unbounded variance. In Part II we consider a general class of subgradient dynamics that restrict trajectories in an arbitrary convex domain, and show that when an equilibrium point exists their limiting trajectories are solutions of subgradient dynamics on only affine subspaces. The latter is a smooth class of dynamics with an asymptotic behaviour exactly characterized in Part I, as solutions to explicit linear ODEs. These results are used to formulate corresponding convergence criteria and are demonstrated with several examples and applications presented in Part II.

In this paper, we establish uniqueness of the solution of the Vlasov-Poisson system with spatial density belonging to a certain class of Orlicz spaces. This extends the uniqueness result of Loeper (which holds for uniformly bounded density) and the uniqueness result of the second author. Uniqueness is a direct consequence of our main result, which provides a quantitative stability estimate for the Wasserstein distance between two weak solutions with spatial density in such Orlicz spaces, in the spirit of Dobrushin's proof of stability for mean-field PDEs. Our proofs are built on the second-order structure of the underlying characteristic system associated to the equation.

We develop a new technique for establishing quantitative propagation of chaos for systems of interacting particles. Using this technique we prove propagation of chaos for diffusing particles whose interaction kernel is merely H\"older continuous, even at long ranges. Moreover, we do not require specially prepared initial data. On the way, we establish a law of large numbers for SDEs that holds over a class of vector fields simultaneously. The proofs bring together ideas from empirical process theory and stochastic flows., Comment: 47 pages; corrected minimal H\"older exponent for second order case; fixed typos

We develop a technique of multiple scale asymptotic expansions along mean flows and a corresponding notion of weak multiple scale convergence. These are applied to homogenize convection dominated parabolic equations with rapidly oscillating, locally periodic coefficients and $\mathcal{O}(\eps^{-1})$ mean convection term. Crucial to our analysis is the introduction of a fast time variable, $\tau=\frac{t}{\eps}$, not apparent in the heterogeneous problem. The effective diffusion coefficient is expressed in terms of the average of Eulerian cell solutions along the orbits of the mean flow in the fast time variable. To make this notion rigorous, we use the theory of ergodic algebras with mean value., Comment: 54 pages

We study convergence to equilibrium for the kinetic Fokker-Planck equation on the torus. Solving the stochastic differential equation, we show exponential convergence in the Monge-Kantorovich-Wasserstein $\mathcal{W}_2$ distance. Finally, we investigate if such a coupling can be obtained by a co-adapted coupling, and show that then the bound must depend on the square root of the initial distance., Comment: 12 pages (minor correction in v2)

The relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system describes the evolution of a collisionless plasma. The problem of linear instability of this system is considered in two physical settings: the so-called "one and one-half" dimensional case, and the three dimensional case with cylindrical symmetry. Sufficient conditions for instability are obtained in terms of the spectral properties of certain Schr\"odinger operators that act on the spatial variable alone (and not in full phase space). An important aspect of these conditions is that they do not require any boundedness assumptions on the domains, nor do they require monotonicity of the equilibrium., Comment: 49 pages

The problem of approximating the discrete spectra of families of self-adjoint operators that are merely strongly continuous is addressed. It is well-known that the spectrum need not vary continuously (as a set) under strong perturbations. However, it is shown that under an additional compactness assumption the spectrum does vary continuously, and a family of symmetric finite-dimensional approximations is constructed. An important feature of these approximations is that they are valid for the entire family uniformly. An application of this result to the study of plasma instabilities is illustrated., Comment: 22 pages, final version to appear in Commun. Math. Phys