Singular Behavior of the Solution to the Stochastic Heat Equation on a Polygonal Domain

Abstract

We study the stochastic heat equation with trace class noise and zero Dirichlet boundary condition on a bounded polygonal domain O in R^2. It is shown that the solution u can be decomposed into a regular part u_R and a singular part u_S which incorporates the corner singularity functions for the Poisson problem. Due to the temporal irregularity of the noise, both u_R and u_S have negative L_2-Sobolev regularity of order s<-1/2 in time. The regular part u_R admits spatial Sobolev regularity of order r=2, while the spatial Sobolev regularity of u_S is restricted by r<1+\pi/\gamma, where \gamma is the largest interior angle at the boundary of O. We obtain estimates for the Sobolev norm of u_R and the Sobolev norms of the coefficients of the singularity functions. The proof is based on a Laplace transform argument w.r.t. the time variable. The result is of interest in the context of numerical methods for stochastic PDEs.