Weak coupling limit of the Anisotropic KPZ equation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the weak coupling limit of the critical anisotropic KPZ equation, showing convergence to a linear stochastic heat equation with an explicit effective diffusion coefficient, despite the equation's analytical ill-posedness.

Contribution

It provides the first full renormalization result for a critical, singular SPDE that cannot be linearized through transformations like Cole-Hopf.

Findings

Convergence to a linear stochastic heat equation in the weak coupling limit.

Explicit formula for the effective diffusion coefficient depending on the coupling.

Demonstrates the non-trivial effect of nonlinearity under proper scaling.

Abstract

In the present work, we study the two-dimensional anisotropic KPZ equation (AKPZ), which is formally given by \begin{equation*} \partial_t h=\tfrac12 \Delta h + \lambda ((\partial_1 h)^2)-(\partial_2 h)^2) +\xi\,, \end{equation*} where $\xi$ denotes a space-time white noise and $\lambda>0$ is the so-called coupling constant. The AKPZ equation is a {\it critical} SPDE, meaning that not only it is analytically ill-posed but also the breakthrough path-wise techniques for singular SPDEs [M. Hairer, Ann. Math. 2014] and [M. Gubinelli, P. Imkeller and N. Perkowski, Forum of Math., Pi, 2015] are not applicable. As shown in [G. Cannizzaro, D. Erhard, F. Toninelli, arXiv, 2020], the equation regularised at scale $N$ has a diffusion coefficient that diverges logarithmically as the regularisation is removed in the limit $N\to\infty$. Here, we study the \emph{weak coupling limit} where $\lambda=\lambda_N=\hat\lambda/\sqrt{\log N}$: this is the correct scaling that guarantees that the nonlinearity has a still non-trivial but non-divergent effect. In fact, as $N\to\infty$ the sequence of equations converges to the linear stochastic heat equation \begin{equation*} \partial_t h =\tfrac{\nu_{\rm eff}}{2} \Delta h + \sqrt{\nu_{\rm eff}}\xi\,, \end{equation*} where $\nu_{\rm eff} >1$ is explicit and depends non-trivially on $\hat\lambda$. This is the first full renormalization-type result for a critical, singular SPDE which cannot be linearised via Cole-Hopf or any other transformation.