We explicitly solve a variational problem related to upper bounds on the optimal constants in the Cwikel–Lieb–Rozenblum (CLR) and Lieb–Thirring (LT) inequalities, which has recently been derived in Hundertmark et al. (Invent Math 231:111–167, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00222-022-01144-7 ) and Frank et al. (Eur Math Soc 23(8):2583–2600, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1090/pspum/104/01877 ). We achieve this through a variational characterization of the L^1 norm of the Fourier transform of a function and duality, from which we obtain a reformulation in terms of a variant of the Hadamard three lines lemma. By studying Hardy-like spaces of holomorphic functions in a strip in the complex plane, we are able to provide an analytic formula for the minimizers, and use it to get the best possible upper bounds for the optimal constants in the CLR and LT inequalities achievable by the method of Hundertmark et al. (Invent Math 231:111–167, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00222-022-01144-7 ) and Frank et al. (Eur Math Soc 23(8):2583–2600, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1090/pspum/104/01877 ).

We study the occurrence of domain branching in a class of $(d+1)$-dimensional sharp interface models featuring the competition between an interfacial energy and a non-local field energy. Our motivation comes from branching in uniaxial ferromagnets corresponding to $d=2$, but our result also covers twinning in shape-memory alloys near an austenite-twinned-martensite interface (corresponding to $d=1$, thereby recovering a result of Conti [Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 53 (2000), 1448-1474. https://doi.org/cgkvm4 ]). We prove that the energy density of a minimising configuration in a large cuboid domain $Q_{L,T}=[-L,L]^d\times [0,T]$ scales like $T^{-\frac{2}{3}}$ (irrespective of the dimension $d$) if $L\gg T^{\frac{2}{3}}$. While this already provides a lot of insight into the nature of minimisers, it does not characterise their behaviour close to the top and bottom boundaries of the sample, i.e. in the region where the branching is concentrated. More significantly, we show that minimisers exhibit a self-similar behaviour near the top and bottom boundaries in a statistical sense through local energy bounds: for any minimiser in $Q_{L,T}$, the energy density in a small cuboid $Q_{\ell,t}$ centred at the top or bottom boundaries of the sample, with side lengths $\ell \gg t^{\frac{2}{3}}$, satisfies the same scaling law, that is, it is of order $t^{-\frac{2}{3}}$.

The magnetization ripple is a microstructure formed in thin ferromagnetic films. It can be described by minimizers of a nonconvex energy functional leading to a nonlocal and nonlinear elliptic SPDE in two dimensions driven by white noise, which is singular. We address the universal character of the magnetization ripple using variational methods based on $\Gamma$-convergence. Due to the infinite energy of the system, the (random) energy functional has to be renormalized. Using the topology of $\Gamma$-convergence, we give a sense to the law of the renormalized functional that is independent of the way white noise is approximated. More precisely, this universality holds in the class of (not necessarily Gaussian) approximations to white noise satisfying the spectral gap inequality, which allows us to obtain sharp stochastic estimates. As a corollary, we obtain the existence of minimizers with optimal regularity.

There are several proofs by now for the famous Cwikel–Lieb–Rozenblum (CLR) bound, which is a semiclassical bound on the number of bound states for a Schrödinger operator, proven in the 1970s. Of the rather distinct proofs by Cwikel, Lieb, and Rozenblum, the one by Lieb gives the best constant, the one by Rozenblum does not seem to yield any reasonable estimate for the constants, and Cwikel’s proof is said to give a constant which is at least about 2 orders of magnitude off the truth. This situation did not change much during the last 40+ years. It turns out that this common belief, i.e, Cwikel’s approach yields bad constants, is not set in stone: We give a substantial refinement of Cwikel’s original approach which highlights a natural but overlooked connection of the CLR bound with bounds for maximal Fourier multipliers from harmonic analysis. Moreover, it gives an astonishingly good bound for the constant in the CLR inequality. Our proof is also quite flexible and leads to rather precise bounds for a large class of Schrödinger-type operators with generalized kinetic energies.

We extend the variational approach to regularity for optimal transport maps initiated by Goldman and the first author to the case of general cost functions. Our main result is an $\epsilon$-regularity result for optimal transport maps between H\"older continuous densities slightly more quantitative than the result by De Philippis-Figalli. One of the new contributions is the use of almost-minimality: if the cost is quantitatively close to the Euclidean cost function, a minimizer for the optimal transport problem with general cost is an almost-minimizer for the one with quadratic cost. This further highlights the connection between our variational approach and De Giorgi's strategy for $\epsilon$-regularity of minimal surfaces.

We report on a version of Cwikel's proof of the famous Cwikel–Lieb–Rozenblum (CLR) inequality which highlights the connection of the CLR inequality to maximal Fourier multipliers. This new approach enables us to get a constant at least ten times better than Cwikels in all dimensions. In dimensions $d\geq 5$ our results are better than all previously known ones.

We consider solutions to the Kac master equation for initial conditions where N particles are in a thermal equilibrium and \({M \leq N}\) particles are out of equilibrium. We show that such solutions have exponential decay in entropy relative to the thermal state. More precisely, the decay is exponential in time with an explicit rate that is essentially independent on the particle number. This is in marked contrast to previous results which show that the entropy production for arbitrary initial conditions is inversely proportional to the particle number. The proof relies on Nelson’s hypercontractive estimate and the geometric form of the Brascamp–Lieb inequalities due to Franck Barthe. Similar results hold for the Kac–Boltzmann equation with uniform scattering cross sections.

A nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS) with dispersion averaged nonlinearity of saturated type is considered. Such a nonlocal NLS is of integro-differential type and it arises naturally in modeling fiber-optics communication systems with periodically varying dispersion profile (dispersion management). The associated constrained variational principle is shown to posses a ground state solution by constructing a convergent minimizing sequence through the application of a method similar to the classical concentration compactness principle of Lions. One of the obstacles in applying this variational approach is that a saturated nonlocal nonlinearity does not satisfy uniformly the so-called strict sub-additivity condition. This is overcome by applying a special version of Ekeland's variational principle.

The averaged dispersion managed nonlinear Schrödinger equation with saturated nonlinearity is considered. It is shown that under rather general assumptions on the saturated nonlinearity, the ground state solution corresponding to the dispersion managed soliton can be found for both zero residual dispersion and positive residual dispersion. The same applies to diffraction management solitons, which are a discrete version describing certain waveguide arrays.

We study weak solutions of the homogeneous Boltzmann equation for Maxwellian molecules with a logarithmic singularity of the collision kernel for grazing collisions. Even though in this situation the Boltzmann operator enjoys only a very weak coercivity estimate, it still leads to strong smoothing of weak solutions in accordance to the smoothing expected by an analogy with a logarithmic heat equation.

It has long been suspected that the non-cutoff Boltzmann operator has similar coercivity properties to the fractional Laplacian. This has led to the hope that the homogenous Boltzmann equation enjoys similar regularity properties to the heat equation with a fractional Laplacian. In particular, the weak solution of the fully nonlinear non-cutoff homogenous Boltzmann equation with initial datum in \({L^1_2(\mathbb{R}^d)\cap L {\rm log} L(\mathbb{R}^d)}\), i.e., finite mass, energy and entropy, should immediately become Gevrey regular for strictly positive times. We prove this conjecture for Maxwellian molecules.