On dynamical friction in a gaseous medium with a boundary

Dynamical friction arises from the interaction of a perturber and the gravitational wake it excites in the ambient medium. We study the effects of the presence of a boundary on dynamical friction by studying analytically the interaction of perturber with uniform rectilinear motion in a uniform homogeneous medium with a reflecting planar boundary. Wake reflection at a medium's boundary may occur at the edges of truncated disks perturbed by planetary or stellar companions as well as in numerical simulations of planet-disk interaction with no-outflow boundary conditions. In this paper, we show that the presence of the boundary modifies the behaviour of dynamical friction significantly. We find that perturbers are invariably pushed away from the boundary and reach a terminal subsonic velocity near Mach 0.37 regardless of initial velocity. Dynamical friction may even be reversed for Mach numbers less than 0.37 thereby accelerating instead of decelerating the perturber. Perturbers moving parallel to the boundary feel additional friction orthogonal to the direction of motion that is much stronger than the standard friction along the direction of motion. These results indicate that the common use of the standard Chandrasekhar formula as a short hand estimate of dynamical friction may be inadequate as observed in various numerical simulations.Comment: Revised version, 28 pages, 10 figures, Accepted for publication in Astrophysics & Space Scienc

Regularization of subsolutions in discrete weak KAM theory

We expose different methods of regularizations of subsolutions in the context of discrete weak KAM theory. They allow to prove the existence and the density of $C^{1,1}$ subsolutions. Moreover, these subsolutions can be made strict and smooth outside of the Aubry set.Comment: 15 pages, second version. Modified according to the referee's suggestions. The hypotheses are now uniform throughout the paper, which allows a simpler and more general statement of the main result

Ilmanen's Lemma on Insertion of C1,1^{1,1} Functions

We give a proof of Ilmanen's lemma, which asserts that between a locally semi-convex and a locally semi-concave function it is possible to find a C$^{1,1}$ function.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in Rend. Semin. Mat. Univ. Padov