Rare Transition Events in Nonequilibrium Systems with State-Dependent Noise: Application to Stochastic Current Switching in Semiconductor Superlattices

Prof. Stephen Teitsworth's research centers on theoretical and experimental studies of noise-driven processes in far-from-equilibrium systems. Recent activity has centered around the development and implementation of novel metrics such as stochastic area which allow one to quantify how far from equilibrium a system is.  These concepts have been developed and applied to low dimensional systems such as mechanical mass-spring assemblies and coupled electronic circuits driven by out-of-equilibrium noise sources.  

Two problems of current interest are: 1) the extension of the stochastic area and related concepts to high-dimensional spatially continuous systems such as elastic filaments (e.g., strings or rods) embedded in viscoelastic media and driven by active noise sources; 2) studies of first-passage processes associated with heating of trapped ions in Paul traps (in collaboration with the group of Prof. Noel at Duke).

Jonathan Christopher  Mattingly grew up in Charlotte, NC, where he attended Irwin Avenue Elementary and Charlotte Country Day.  He graduated from the NC School of Science and Mathematics and received a BS is Applied Mathematics with a concentration in physics from Yale University. After two years abroad with a year spent at ENS Lyon studying nonlinear and statistical physics on a Rotary Fellowship, he returned to the US to attend Princeton University, where he obtained a PhD in Applied and Computational Mathematics in 1998. After 4 years as a Szego assistant professor at Stanford University and a year as a member of the IAS in Princeton, he moved to Duke in 2003. He is currently a professor of mathematics and statistical science.

His expertise is in the longtime behavior of stochastic system including randomly forced fluid dynamics, turbulence, stochastic algorithms used in molecular dynamics and Bayesian sampling, and stochasticity in biochemical networks.

Since 2013 he has also been working to understand and quantify gerrymandering and its interaction of a region's geopolitical landscape. This has lead him to testify in a number of court cases including in North Carolina, which led to the NC congressional and both NC legislative maps being deemed unconstitutional and replaced for the 2020 elections. 

He is the recipient of a Sloan Fellowship and a PECASE CAREER award.  He is also a fellow of the IMS, the AMS, SIAM and AAAS. He was awarded the Defender of Freedom award by  Common Cause for his work on Quantifying Gerrymandering.