Koopman analysis of Burgers equation

The emergence of dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) as a practical way to attempt a Koopman mode decomposition of a nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE) presents exciting prospects for identifying invariant sets and slowly decaying transient structures buried in the PDE dynamics. However, there are many subtleties in connecting DMD to Koopman analysis, and it remains unclear how realistic Koopman analysis is for complex systems such as the Navier-Stokes equations. With this as motivation, we present here a full Koopman decomposition for the velocity field in the Burgers equation by deriving explicit expressions for the Koopman modes and eigenfunctions. As far as we are aware the first time this has been done for a nonlinear PDE. The decomposition highlights the fact that different observables can require different subsets of Koopman eigenfunctions to express them, and it presents a nice example in which (i) the Koopman modes are linearly dependent and so they cannot be fit a posteriori to snapshots of the flow without knowledge of the Koopman eigenfunctions, and (ii) the Koopman eigenvalues are highly degenerate, which means that computed Koopman modes become initial-condition-dependent. As a way of illustration, we discuss the form of the Koopman expansion with various initial conditions, and we assess the capability of DMD to extract the decaying nonlinear coherent structures in run-down simulations.