Hitting probabilities for systems of non-linear stochastic heat equations with multiplicative noise

We consider a system of d non-linear stochastic heat equations in spatial dimension 1 driven by d-dimensional space-time white noise. The non-linearities appear both as additive drift terms and as multipliers of the noise. Using techniques of Malliavin calculus, we establish upper and lower bounds on the one-point density of the solution u(t, x), and upper bounds of Gaussian-type on the two-point density of (u(s, y),u(t, x)). In particular, this estimate quantifies how this density degenerates as (s, y) → (t, x). From these results, we deduce upper and lower bounds on hitting probabilities of the process {u(t,x)}t∈R+,x∈[0,1] , in terms of respectively Hausdorff measure and Newtonian capacity. These estimates make it possible to show that points are polar when d ≥ 7 and are not polar when d ≤ 5. We also show that the Hausdorff dimension of the range of the process is 6 when d > 6, and give analogous results for the processes t↦u(t,x) and x↦u(t,x) . Finally, we obtain the values of the Hausdorff dimensions of the level sets of these processes.R.C. Dalang is supported in part by the Swiss National Foundation for Scientific Research. D. Khoshnevisan’s research is supported in part by a grant from the US National Science Foundation