On stretch-limited elastic strings

Motivated by the increased interest in modelling non-dissipative materials by constitutive relations more general than those from Cauchy elasticity, we initiate the study of a class of stretch-limited elastic strings : the string cannot be compressed smaller than a certain length less than its natural length nor elongated larger than a certain length greater than its natural length. In particular, we consider equilibrium states for a string suspended between two points under the force of gravity (catenaries). We study the locations of the supports resulting in tensile states containing both extensible and inextensible segments in two situations: the degenerate case when the string is vertical and the non-degenerate case when the supports are at the same height. We then study the existence and multiplicity of equilibrium states in general with multiplicity differing markedly from strings satisfying classical constitutive relations.

Gravitational Constraints on a Lightlike Boundary

We analyse the boundary structure of general relativity in the coframe formalism in the case of a lightlike boundary, i.e. when the restriction of the induced Lorentzian metric to the boundary is degenerate. We describe the associated reduced phase space in terms of constraints on the symplectic space of boundary fields. We explicitly compute the Poisson brackets of the constraints and identify the first- and second-class ones. In particular, in the 3+1-dimensional case, we show that the reduced phase space has two local degrees of freedom, instead of the usual four in the non-degenerate case.

Skew Killing spinors in four dimensions

This paper is devoted to the classification of 4-dimensional Riemannian spin manifolds carrying skew Killing spinors. A skew Killing spinor $$\psi $$ ψ is a spinor that satisfies the equation $$\nabla _X\psi =AX\cdot \psi $$ ∇ X ψ = A X · ψ with a skew-symmetric endomorphism A. We consider the degenerate case, where the rank of A is at most two everywhere and the non-degenerate case, where the rank of A is four everywhere. We prove that in the degenerate case the manifold is locally isometric to the Riemannian product $${\mathbb {R}}\times N$$ R × N with N having a skew Killing spinor and we explain under which conditions on the spinor the special case of a local isometry to $${\mathbb {S}}^2\times {\mathbb {R}}^2$$ S 2 × R 2 occurs. In the non-degenerate case, the existence of skew Killing spinors is related to doubly warped products whose defining data we will describe.

Ordinary hyperspheres and spherical curves

An ordinary hypersphere of a set of points in real d-space, where no d + 1 points lie on a (d - 2)-sphere or a (d - 2)-flat, is a hypersphere (including the degenerate case of a hyperplane) that contains exactly d + 1 points of the set. Similarly, a (d + 2)-point hypersphere of such a set is one that contains exactly d + 2 points of the set. We find the minimum number of ordinary hyperspheres, solving the d-dimensional spherical analogue of the Dirac–Motzkin conjecture for d ⩾ 3. We also find the maximum number of (d + 2)-point hyperspheres in even dimensions, solving the d-dimensional spherical analogue of the orchard problem for even d ⩾ 4.

Randomly switched vector fields sharing a zero on a common invariant face

We consider a Piecewise Deterministic Markov Process given by random switching between finitely many vector fields vanishing at [Formula: see text]. It has been shown recently that the behavior of this process is mainly determined by the signs of Lyapunov exponents. However, results have only been given when all these exponents have the same sign. In this paper, we consider the degenerate case where the process leaves invariant some face and results are stated when the Lyapunov exponents are of opposite signs. Our results enable in particular to close a gap in a discussion on random switching between two Lorenz vector fields by Bakhtin and Hurth, Invariant densities for dynamical systems with random switching, Nonlinearity 25 (2012) 2937–2952.