Dr. Andreas Eberle of the University of Bonn in Germany, will present the next Math Lecture, on Friday, March 23rd. He will discuss “Couplings, metrics, and contraction rates for Langevin diffusions.” This free lecture is open to all. The event begins at 11:20 a.m. in Armitage Hall, Room 121.
The abstract is as follows:
“Carefully constructed Markovian couplings and specifically designed Kantorovich metrics can be used to derive relatively precise bounds on the distance between the laws of two Langevin processes. In the case of two overdamped Langevin diffusions with the same drift, the processes are coupled by reflection, and the metric is an L1 Wasserstein distance based on an appropriately chosen concave distance function. If the processes have different drifts, then the reflection coupling can be replaced by a „sticky coupling“ where the distance between the two copies is bounded from above by a one-dimensional diffusion process with a sticky boundary at 0. This new type of coupling leads to long-time stable bounds on the total variation distance between the two laws. Similarly, two kinetic Langevin processes can be coupled using a particular combination of a reflection and a synchronous coupling that is sticky on a hyperplane. Again, the coupling distance is contractive on average w.r.t. an appropriately designed Wasserstein distance. This can be applied to derive new bounds of kinetic order for convergence to equilibrium at the borderline between the overdamped and the underdamped regime. Similar approaches are also useful when studying mean-field interacting particle systems, McKean-Vlasov diffusions, or diffusions on infinite dimensional state spaces. (joint work with Arnaud Guillin and Raphael Zimmer).”