This paper deals with homogenization of second order divergence form parabolic operators with locally stationary coefficients. Roughly speaking, locally stationary coefficients have two evolution scales: both an almost constant microscopic one and a smoothly varying macroscopic one. The homogenization procedure aims to give a macroscopic approximation that takes into account the microscopic heterogeneities. This paper follows "Diffusion in a locally stationary random environment" (published in Probability Theory and Related Fields) and improves this latter work by considering possibly degenerate diffusion matrices. The geometry of the homogenized equation shows that the particle is trapped in subspace of R^d.
We study a diffusion process with random space-time dependent coefficients. Moreover the diffusion matrix is allowed to degenerate. An invariance principle is proved provided that the diffusion coefficient is controlled by a time independent one.
In this paper a semilinear elliptic PDE with rapidly oscillating coefficients is homogenized. The novetly of our result lies in the fact that we allow the second order part of the differential operator to be degenerate in some portion of $\R^d$.\\ Our fully probabilistic method is based on the connection between PDEs and BSDEs with random terminal time and the weak convergence of a class of diffusion processes.
We study the long time behavior (homogenization) of a diffusion in random medium with time and space dependent coefficients. The diffusion coefficient may degenerate. In Stochastic Process. Appl. (2007) (to appear), an invariance principle is proved for the critical rescaling of the diffusion. Here, we generalize this approach to diffusions whose space-time scaling differs from the critical one.
We study discrete linear divergence-form operators with random coefficients, also known as the random conductance model. We assume that the conductances are bounded, independent and stationary; the law of a conductance may depend on the orientation of the associated edge. We give a simple necessary and sufficient condition for the relaxation of the environment seen by the particle to be diffusive, in the sense of every polynomial moment. As a consequence, we derive polynomial moment estimates on the corrector.
We study the limit behaviour of a sequence of non-convex, vectorial, random integral functionals, defined on $W^{1,1}$, whose integrands satisfy degenerate linear growth conditions. These involve suitable random, scale-dependent weight-functions. Under minimal assumptions on the integrand and on the weight-functions, we show that the sequence of functionals homogenizes to a non-degenerate functional defined on $BV$.
We consider the homogenization of Hamilton-Jacobi equations and degenerate Bellman equations in stationary, ergodic, unbounded environments. We prove that, as the microscopic scale tends to zero, the equation averages to a deterministic Hamilton-Jacobi equation and study some properties of the effective Hamiltonian. We discover a connection between the effective Hamiltonian and an eikonal-type equation in exterior domains. In particular, we obtain a new formula for the effective Hamiltonian. To prove the results we introduce a new strategy to obtain almost sure homogenization, completing a pro…
This paper studies homogenization of symmetric non-local Dirichlet forms with $α$-stable-like jumping kernels in one-parameter stationary ergodic environment. Under suitable conditions, we establish homogenization results and identify the limiting effective Dirichlet forms explicitly. The coefficients of the jumping kernels of Dirichlet forms and symmetrizing measures are allowed to be degenerate and unbounded; and the coefficients in the effective Dirichlet forms can be degenerate.
It is well-known under the name of `periodic homogenization' that, under a centering condition of the drift, a periodic diffusion process on R^d converges, under diffusive rescaling, to a d-dimensional Brownian motion. Existing proofs of this result all rely on uniform ellipticity or hypoellipticity assumptions on the diffusion. In this paper, we considerably weaken these assumptions in order to allow for the diffusion coefficient to even vanish on an open set. As a consequence, it is no longer the case that the effective diffusivity matrix is necessarily non-degenerate. It turns out that, pro…
We study homogenization properties of the discrete Laplace operator with random conductances on a large domain in $\mathbb{Z}^d$. More precisely, we prove almost-sure homogenization of the discrete Poisson equation and of the top of the Dirichlet spectrum. We assume that the conductances are stationary, ergodic and nearest-neighbor conductances are positive. In contrast to earlier results, we do not require uniform ellipticity but certain integrability conditions on the lower and upper tails of the conductances. We further allow jumps of arbitrary length. Without the long-range connections, th…
We study the continuum limit of discrete, nonconvex energy functionals defined on crystal lattices in dimensions $d\geq 2$. Since we are interested in energy functionals with random (stationary and ergodic) pair interactions, our problem corresponds to a stochastic homogenization problem. In the non-degenerate case, when the interactions satisfy a uniform $p$-growth condition, the homogenization problem is well-understood. In this paper, we are interested in a degenerate situation, when the interactions neither satisfy a uniform growth condition from above nor from below. We consider interacti…
We study the random conductance model on the lattice $\mathbb{Z}^d$, i.e. we consider a linear, finite-difference, divergence-form operator with random coefficients and the associated random walk under random conductances. We allow the conductances to be unbounded and degenerate elliptic, but they need to satisfy a strong moment condition and a quantified ergodicity assumption in form of a spectral gap estimate. As a main result we obtain in dimension $d\geq 3$ quantitative central limit theorems for the random walk in form of a Berry-Esseen estimate with speed $t^{-\frac 1 5+\varepsilon}$ for…
In this article, we obtain a functional CLT for a class of degenerate diffusion processes with periodic coefficients, thus generalizing the already classical results in the context of uniformly elliptic diffusions. As an application, we also discuss periodic homogenization of a class of linear degenerate elliptic and parabolic PDEs.
We prove explicit estimates for the error in random homogenization of degenerate, second-order Hamilton-Jacobi equations, assuming the coefficients satisfy a finite range of dependence. In particular, we obtain an algebraic rate of convergence with overwhelming probability under certain structural conditions on the Hamiltonian.
We study the qualitative homogenization of second order viscous Hamilton-Jacobi equations in space-time stationary ergodic random environments. Assuming that the Hamiltonian is convex and superquadratic in the momentum variable (gradient) we establish a homogenization result and characterize the effective Hamiltonian for arbitrary (possibly degenerate) elliptic diffusion matrices. The result extends previous work that required uniform ellipticity and space-time homogeneity for the diffusion.
Consider a linear elliptic partial differential equation in divergence form with a random coefficient field. The solution operator displays fluctuations around its expectation. The recently developed pathwise theory of fluctuations in stochastic homogenization reduces the characterization of these fluctuations to those of the so-called standard homogenization commutator. In this contribution, we investigate the scaling limit of this key quantity: starting from a Gaussian-like coefficient field with possibly strong correlations, we establish the convergence of the rescaled commutator to a fract…
We study homogenization for a class of generalized Langevin equations (GLEs) with state-dependent coefficients and exhibiting multiple time scales. In addition to the small mass limit, we focus on homogenization limits, which involve taking to zero the inertial time scale and, possibly, some of the memory time scales and noise correlation time scales. The latter are meaningful limits for a class of GLEs modeling anomalous diffusion. We find that, in general, the limiting stochastic differential equations (SDEs) for the slow degrees of freedom contain non-trivial drift correction terms and are …
We consider the corrector equation from the stochastic homogenization of uniformly elliptic finite-difference equations with random, possibly non-symmetric coefficients. Under the assumption that the coefficients are stationary and ergodic in the quantitative form of a Logarithmic Sobolev inequality (LSI), we obtain optimal bounds on the corrector and its gradient in dimensions $d \geq 2$. Similar estimates have recently been obtained in the special case of diagonal coefficients making extensive use of the maximum principle and scalar techniques. Our new method only invokes arguments that are …
For given strongly local Dirichlet forms with possibly degenerate symmetric (sub)-elliptic matrix, we show the existence of weak solutions to the stochastic differential equations (associated with the Dirichlet forms) starting from all points in $\R^d$. More precisely, using heat kernel estimates, stochastic calculus, and Dirichlet form theory, we obtain the pointwise existence of weak solutions to the stochastic differential equations which have possibly unbounded and discontinuous drift. We also present some conditions that the weak solutions become pathwise unique strong solutions and provi…
In this paper we prove a new strong uniqueness result and a weak existence result for possibly {\it degenerate} multidimensional stochastic differential equations with Sobolev diffusion coefficients and rough drifts. In particular, examples with Hölder diffusion coefficients are provided to show our results.
We consider a possibly degenerate porous media type equation over all of $\R^d$ with $d = 1$, with monotone discontinuous coefficients with linear growth and prove a probabilistic representation of its solution in terms of an associated microscopic diffusion. This equation is motivated by some singular behaviour arising in complex self-organized critical systems. The main idea consists in approximating the equation by equations with monotone non-degenerate coefficients and deriving some new analytical properties of the solution.
We apply improved elliptic regularity results to a concrete symmetric Dirichlet form and various non-symmetric Dirichlet forms with possibly degenerate symmetric diffusion matrix. Given the (non)-symmetric Dirichlet form, using elliptic regularity results and stochastic calculus we show weak existence of the corresponding singular stochastic differential equation for any starting point in some subset E of R^d. As an application of our approach we can show the existence of n-regularized Liouville Brownian motion only via Dirichlet form theory starting from all points in R^2.
Using analysis for 2-admissible functions in weighted Sobolev spaces and stochastic calculus for possibly degenerate symmetric elliptic forms, we construct weak solutions to a wide class of stochastic differential equations starting from an explicitly specified subset in Euclidean space. The solutions have typically unbounded and discontinuous drift but may still in some cases start from all points of $\mathbb{R}^d$ and thus in particular from those where the drift terms are infinite. As a consequence of our approach we are able to provide new non-explosion criteria for the unique strong solut…
We consider a possibly strongly degenerate parabolic semilinear problem which can be applied to a differential model for pricing financial derivatives. We prove the asked regularity for applying the Ito's formula which is used for building the differential model.
We study a constrained optimal control problem with possibly degenerate coefficients arising in models of optimal portfolio liquidation under market impact. The coefficients can be random in which case the value function is described by a degenerate backward stochastic partial differential equation (BSPDE) with singular terminal condition. For this degenerate BSPDE, we prove existence and uniqueness of a nonnegative solution. Our existence result requires a novel gradient estimate for degenerate BSPDEs.
In this paper we study the global boundedness for the solutions to a class of possibly degenerate parabolic equations by De-Giorgi's iteration. As applications, we show the existence of weak solutions for possibly degenerate stochastic differential equations with singular diffusion and drift coefficients. Moreover, by the Markov selection theorem of Krylov [8], we also establish the existence of the associated strong Markov family.
We prove uniqueness in law for possibly degenerate SDEs having a linear part in the drift term. Diffusion coefficients corresponding to non-degenerate directions of the noise are assumed to be continuous. When the diffusion part is constant we recover the classical degenerate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process which only has to satisfy the Hörmander hypoellipticity condition. In the proof we use global $L^p$-estimates for hypoelliptic Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operators recently proved in Bramanti-Cupini-Lanconelli-Priola (Math. Z. 266 (2010)) and adapt the localization procedure introduced by Stroock and Va…
In this article we prove the existence and uniqueness for degenerate stochastic differential equations with Sobolev (possibly singular) drift and diffusion coefficients in a generalized sense. In particular, our result covers the classical DiPerna-Lions flows and, we also obtain the well-posedness for degenerate Fokker-Planck equations with irregular coefficients. Moreover, a large deviation principle of Freidlin-Wenzell type for this type of SDEs is established.
We show uniqueness in law for a general class of stochastic differential equations in $\mathbb{R}^d$, $d\ge 2$, with possibly degenerate and/or fully discontinuous locally bounded coefficients among all weak solutions that spend zero time at the points of degeneracy of the dispersion matrix. The points of degeneracy have $d$-dimensional Lebesgue-Borel measure zero. Weak existence is obtained for more general, not necessarily locally bounded drift coefficient.
We consider the Cauchy problem for a stochastic scalar parabolic-hyperbolic equation in any space dimension with nonlocal, nonlinear, and possibly degenerate diffusion terms. The equations are nonlocal because they involve fractional diffusion operators. We adapt the notion of stochastic entropy solution and provide a new technical framework to prove the uniqueness. The existence proof relies on the vanishing viscosity method. Moreover, using bounded variation (BV) estimates for vanishing viscosity approximations, we derive an explicit continuous dependence estimate on the nonlinearities and d…
We study the smoothness of the upper and lower value functions of stochastic differential games in the framework of time-homogeneous (possibly degenerate) diffusion processes in a domain, under the assumption that the diffusion, drift and discount coefficients are all independent of the spatial variables. Under suitable conditions (see Assumptions 2.1 and 2.2), we obtain the optimal local Lipschitz continuity of the value functions, provided that the running and terminal payoffs are globally Lipschitz. As applications, we obtain the stochastic representation and optimal interior $C^{0,1}$-regu…
We consider a multidimensional time-homogeneous dynamical system and add a randomly perturbed time-dependent deterministic signal to some of its components, giving rise to a high-dimensional system of stochastic differential equations, which is driven by possibly very low-dimensional noise. Equations of this type commonly occur in biology when modelling neurons or in statistical mechanics for certain Hamiltonian systems. We provide verifiable conditions on the original deterministic dynamical system under which the solution to the respective stochastic system features a point in the interior o…
