Brownian motion in Minkowski normed spaces

Abstract

A Minkowski normed space is the Euclidean space equipped with a (possibly asymmetric) uniformly convex and smooth norm, forming a particular class of Finsler manifolds. We construct a stochastic process with one-dimensional time marginal densities given by the fundamental solution to the nonlinear Finsler heat equation in Minkowski normed spaces. This process is constructed as a solution to a singular McKean--Vlasov stochastic differential equation and constitutes a nonlinear Markov process in the sense of McKean. Furthermore, we show that solutions to this stochastic differential equation are pathwise unique, and thus probabilistically strong solutions, though the equation has singular coefficients beyond the subcritical regime. Since our construction is a natural extension of the construction of standard Brownian motion from the standard heat kernel, we call this process \emph{Brownian motion in Minkowski normed spaces.} To the best of our knowledge, this is the first construction of stochastic processes associated with nonlinear heat equation in Finslerian spaces.