Paracontrolled calculus for quasilinear singular PDEs (Q6116909)

The authors consider the quasilinear, stochastic and singular partial differential equation \(\partial _{t}u-d(u)Au=f(u)\zeta \), where \(\zeta \) stands for a space-time noise of parabolic Hölder regularity \(\alpha -2\) , with \(2/5<\alpha <1/2\), \(u\) is a real-valued function defined on a 3D closed, Riemannian, and smooth manifold \(M\), \(A\) a smooth elliptic operator on \(M\), and the diffusivity function \(d\) is supposed to be smooth enough and to take its values in a compact subset of \((0,+\infty )\). The authors then extend the paracontrolled calculus which was introduced by \textit{M. Gubinelli}, \textit{P. Imkeller} and \textit{N. Perkowski} in [Forum Math. Pi 3, Paper No. e6, 75 p. (2015; Zbl 1333.60149)], to prove a local in time well-posedness result for the above equation. To define the paraproduct and resonant operators, they introduce the Paley-Littlewood decomposition of any distribution \(f\) as the sum \(f=\sum_{i\geq -1}\Delta _{i}(f)\) of smooth functions and they write the product of two distributions as: \(fg=\sum_{i<j-1}\Delta _{i}(f)\Delta _{j}(g)+\sum_{\left\vert i-j\right\vert \leq 1}\Delta _{i}(f)\Delta _{j}(g)+\sum_{i-1>j}\Delta _{i}(f)\Delta _{j}(g)=:P_{f}g+\Pi (f,g)+P_{g}f\), where \(P\) is called the paraproduct operator and \(\Pi \) the resonant operator. To any sufficiently regular second order differential operator \(L\) in Hörmander form, its parabolic operator \(\mathcal{L}=\partial _{t}+L\) is associated, with inverse map \(\mathcal{L}^{-1}\), together with a paraproduct \(P\) and its companion paraproduct \(\widetilde{P}\), through the relationship \(\mathcal{L}^{-1}\circ P=\widetilde{P}\circ \mathcal{L}^{-1}\). Because of the presence of the noise \(\zeta \) in the above equation, a solution space made up of functions/distributions of the form \( u=\sum_{i=1}^{k_{0}}\widetilde{P}_{u_{i}}Z_{i}+u^{\sharp }\) is considered, where \(Z_{i}\) are reference functions/distributions of regularity \(i\alpha \) that depend formally only on \(\zeta \), \(k_{0}\) is the order of the expansion chosen in such a way that \((k_{0}+1)\alpha +(\alpha -2)>0\), \(u_{i}\) are the `derivatives' of \(u\) which also need to satisfy similar structure equations to a lower order, and \(u^{\sharp }\) represents all the remainders in these expansions. The authors also define an asymptotic expansion of the second member of the preceding equation. For a family \((\beta _{w})_{w\in \mathcal{W }}\) of positive real numbers, a system paracontrolled by \(\mathcal{J}\) at order \(n\) is a family \(\widehat{u}=(u_{w})_{w\in \mathcal{W}}\) of parabolic functions such that \(u_{w}=\sum_{\tau \in \mathcal{J};\left\vert w\tau \right\vert \leq n\alpha }\widetilde{P}u_{w\tau }[\tau ]+u_{w}^{\sharp }\), with \(u_{w}^{\sharp }\in C^{n\alpha +\beta _{w}-\left\vert w\right\vert }\) for all \(w\in \mathcal{W}\), and \(\sum_{w\in \mathcal{W}}(\left\vert w\right\vert )\left\Vert u_{w}^{\sharp }\right\Vert _{C^{n\alpha +\beta _{w}-\left\vert w\right\vert }}<\infty \). The main result of the paper proves that the above problem has a unique local in time solution in the space \(\mathcal{S}(u_{0})=\{\widehat{u}^{\sharp };\sum_{w\in \mathcal{W} }(\left\vert w\right\vert )\left\Vert u_{w}^{\sharp }\right\Vert _{C^{n\alpha +\beta _{w}-\left\vert w\right\vert }}<\infty \), and \( u_{w}^{\sharp }\mid _{t=0}=h_{w}(u_{0})\), \(\text{ for all } w\in \mathcal{W}\}\), which depends continuously on \(\mathcal{J}\), for an appropriate \(u_{0}\). The proof is obtained through a contraction argument for an associated functional and properties of the paracontrolled calculus developed in the paper.