David Lloyd is visiting Imperial College London today (Thursday 6th February) to give a talk in the DynamIC Seminar.  The title of his talk is “Nucleation of localised Ferrosolitons and Ferro-patterns”. Experiments involving a plate of magnetic fluid in the presence of a magnetic field have shown that it is possible for stable localised spots on the surface of the magnetic to exist. Building on work analysing localised patterns in reaction-diffusion equations, the talk will try to explain the nucleation of such spots for the magnetic fluid and some of their properties away from onset.

In particular, David will show that the equations governing the free-surface of the magnetic fluid obey an energy principle. Furthermore, an approximate Hamiltonian formulation can be found near onset that simplifies a centre-manifold reduction for patterns in the one-dimensional case. Finally, some numerical continuation results will be shown for 2D and 3D localised Ferropatterns and connected to work on reaction-diffusion systems in the presence of a conserved quantity.