A dynamic Laplacian for identifying Lagrangian coherent structures on weighted Riemannian manifolds (Q2022702)

The mathematics of transport and mixing in nonlinear dynamical systems has received considerable attention, driven in part by applications in fluid dynamics, atmospheric and ocean dynamics, molecular dynamics, granular flow, and other biological and engineering processes. In this work the authors extend the results of the first author [Nonlinearity 28, No. 10, 3587--3622 (2015; Zbl 1352.37063)] in three ways: (1) to dynamics that is not volume-preserving, (2) to track the transport of non-uniformly distributed tracers, and (3) to dynamics on curved manifolds. The work is very deep and contains very well structured technical developments. The paper starts with relevant background material from differential geometry. This is followed by the description of the dynamic isoperimetric problem on weighted manifolds and the Federer-Fleming theorem is stated. Finally, the authors provide details about the dynamic Laplace operator on weighted manifolds and they state the dynamic Cheeger inequality and the main convergence result. A section is then devoted to numerical experiments. The proofs are in the appendices.