Existence and space-time regularity for stochastic heat equations on p.c.f. fractals

We define linear stochastic heat equations (SHE) on p.c.f.s.s. sets equipped with regular harmonic structures. We show that if the spectral dimension of the set is less than two, then function-valued “random-field” solutions to these SPDEs exist and are jointly Hölder continuous in space and time. We calculate the respective Hölder exponents, which extend the well-known results on the Hölder exponents of the solution to SHE on the unit interval. This shows that the “curse of dimensionality” of the SHE on Rn depends not on the geometric dimension of the ambient space but on the analytic properties of the operator through the spectral dimension. To prove these results we establish generic continuity theorems for stochastic processes indexed by these p.c.f.s.s. sets that are analogous to Kolmogorov’s continuity theorem. We also investigate the long-time behaviour of the solutions to the fractal SHEs