Paper No. 09-13
JC Mattingly, SA McKinley and NS Pillai
Geometric erogdicity of a bead-spring pair with stochastic Stokes forcing
Abstract: We consider a simple model for the uctuating hydrodynamics of a exible polymer in dilute solution, demonstrating geometric ergodicity for a pair of particles that interact with each other through a nonlinear spring potential while being advected by a stochastic Stokes uid velocity field. This is a generalization of previous models which have used linear spring forces as well as white-in-time uid velocity fields. We follow previous work combining control theoretic arguments, Lyapunov functions, and hypo-elliptic diffusion theory to prove exponential convergence via a Harris chain argument. To this, we add the possibility of excluding certain \bad" sets in phase space in which the assumptions are violated but from which the systems leaves with a controllable probability. This allows for the treatment of singular drifts, such as those derived from the Lennard-Jones potential, which is an novel feature of this work.
