Variational methods for some singular stochastic elliptic PDEs

TL;DR

This paper develops variational methods to establish existence and multiplicity of solutions for singular stochastic elliptic PDEs on Riemannian surfaces, including cases with non-energy characterizable equations, advancing the understanding of such complex stochastic systems.

Contribution

It introduces novel variational techniques for solving singular stochastic elliptic PDEs that are not solvable by classical fixed point methods, including equations characterized as critical points of energy functionals and those requiring self-dual functional frameworks.

Findings

Proved existence of solutions for a class of singular stochastic PDEs involving white noise.

Established the existence of infinitely many solutions under symmetry conditions.

Applied variational methods to equations not derivable from energy functionals, expanding solvability frameworks.

Abstract

We use some tools from nonlinear analysis to study two examples of singular stochastic elliptic PDEs that cannot be solved by the contraction principle or the Schauder fixed point theorem. Let $\xi$ stand for a spatial white noise on a closed Riemannian surface $S$. We prove the existence of a solution to the equation $$ (-\Delta + a)u = f(u) + \xi u $$ with a potential $a\in L^p(S)$ and $p>1$, and $f$ subject to growth conditions. Under an additional parity condition on $f$ -- met for instance when $f(u) = u\vert u\vert^\ell$, with $\ell$ an even innteger, we further prove that this equation has infinitely many solutions, in stark contrast with all the well-posedness results that have been proved so far for singular stochastic PDEs under a small parameter assumption. This kind of results is obtained by seeing the equation as characterizing the critical points of an energy functional based on the Anderson operator $H=\Delta + \xi$ and by resorting to variants of the mountain pass theorem. There are however some interesting equations that cannot be characterized as the critical points of an energy functional. Such is the case of the singular Choquard-Pecard equation on $\mathbb{T}^2$ $$ (-\Delta + a)u = \big(w\star f(u)\big)g(u) + \xi u $$ One can use Ghoussoub's machinery of self-dual functionals to prove the existence of a solution to that equation as the minimum of a self-dual strongly coercive functional under proper assumptions on the coefficients $a,w,f$ and $g$.