CRM-McGill Applied Math Seminar
Tuesday Mar 18th, 2008, 3:35pm
Burnside Room 1205

Speaker: Mark Embree, Rice University

Title: Approximation and Recovery of Damped Wave Operators

Damped, vibrating strings provide one of the simplest settings
in which to compare results from the spectral theory of
non-self-adjoint differential operators to laboratory measurements.
In this talk, we shall survey the spectral properties related to
viscous, Kelvin-Voigt, and magnetic damping mechanisms, along with
some allied questions of optimal design (minimizing spectral abscissa,
minimizing energy).  We shall describe a method for approximating a
spatially-dependent viscous damping function from spectral measurements,
and conclude by demonstrating the challenges of applying such inverse
spectral theory to high-precision data measured on our laboratory's monochord.

This talk describes joint work with Steven J. Cox and Jeffrey Hokanson.