Stochastic heat equation with nondegenerate H\"older diffusion coefficient: uniqueness below the three-fourth threshold

Abstract

We consider stochastic heat equation (SHE) defined on 1-d torus $\mathbb{T}$ of the form $$\partial_t u=\Delta u+g(u)\dot{W},$$where $\dot{W}$ is a space-time white noise and $g$ is a real-valued function which is uniformly elliptic (i.e., $|g|$ is uniformly bounded away from 0), and is globally $\beta$-Holder continuous for some $\beta\in(0,1)$. We prove that weak uniqueness holds as long as $\beta>\frac{2}{3}$. The same uniqueness holds for vector-valued solutions where the coefficient $G$ has the same dimension as the white noise. Previously, uniqueness of solutions to the SHE with Holder diffusion coefficient was only established for $\beta>\frac{3}{4}$ via a Yamada Watanabe argument by Mytnik and Perkins (arxiv:0809.0248) without assuming $g$ is nonzero. And when $\beta<\frac{3}{4}$, Mueller, Mytnik and Perkins (arXiv:1201.2767) constructed a non-unique SPDE example satisfying $g(0)=0$. A later generalized coupling argument for nondegenerate $g$ also stopped at the same threshold $\frac{3}{4}$. Our result shows that uniform ellipticity of $g$ restores uniqueness to SHEs in the Holder regime where the same SHE with non-elliptic $g$ and the same Holder regularity are often non-unique in law. This constitutes the first general class of SHE weak uniqueness results in the $\beta\in(\frac{2}{3},\frac{3}{4}]$ regime.