Michael Röckner - Böcker

This book delves into a rigorous mathematical exploration of the well-posedness and long-time behavior of weak solutions to nonlinear Fokker-Planck equations, along with their implications in the theory of probabilistically weak solutions to McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations and the corresponding nonlinear Markov processes.

This book provides an introduction to the theory of stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) of evolutionary type. SPDEs are one of the main research directions in probability theory with several wide ranging applications. Many types of dynamics with stochastic influence in nature or man-made complex systems can be modelled by such equations. The theory of SPDEs is based both on the theory of deterministic partial differential equations, as well as on modern stochastic analysis. Whilst this volume mainly follows the ‘variational approach’, it also contains a short account on the ‘semigroup (or mild solution) approach’. In particular, the volume contains a complete presentation of the main existence and uniqueness results in the case of locally monotone coefficients. Various types of generalized coercivity conditions are shown to guarantee non-explosion, but also a systematic approach to treat SPDEs with explosion in finite time is developed. It is, so far, the only book where the latter and the ‘locally monotone case’ is presented in a detailed and complete way for SPDEs. The extension to this more general framework for SPDEs, for example, in comparison to the well-known case of globally monotone coefficients, substantially widens the applicability of the results.

Focusing on stochastic porous media equations, this book places an emphasis on existence theorems, asymptotic behavior and ergodic properties of the associated transition semigroup. Stochastic perturbations of the porous media equation have reviously been considered by physicists, but rigorous mathematical existence results have only recently been found.The porous media equation models a number of different physical phenomena, including the flow of an ideal gas and the diffusion of a compressible fluid through porous media, and also thermal propagation in plasma and plasma radiation. Another important application is to a model of the standard self-organized criticality process, called the "sand-pile model" or the "Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld model".The book will be of interest to PhD students and researchers in mathematics, physics and biology.

The purpose of this book is to give a stream-lined introduction to the theory of Dirichlet forms on general state spaces. It includes both the analytic and probabilistic components of the theory. A substantial part of the book is designed for a one-year graduate course. It provides a framework which covers both the well-studied "classical" theory of regular Dirichlet forms on locally compact state spaces and all recent extensions to infinite-dimensional state spaces. It also contains a complete proof of an analytic characterization of the class of Dirichlet forms which are associated with right continuous strong Markov processes, i.e. those having a probabilistic counterpart. Finally, a general regularization method is developed which makes it possible to transfer all results known in the classical locally compact regular case to this (in the above sense) most general class of Dirichlet forms.

These lectures concentrate on (nonlinear) stochastic partial differential equations (SPDE) of evolutionary type. All kinds of dynamics with stochastic influence in nature or man-made complex systems can be modelled by such equations. To keep the technicalities minimal we confine ourselves to the case where the noise term is given by a stochastic integral w.r.t. a cylindrical Wiener process.But all results can be easily generalized to SPDE with more general noises such as, for instance, stochastic integral w.r.t. a continuous local martingale.There are basically three approaches to analyze SPDE: the "martingale measure approach", the "mild solution approach” and the "variational approach". The purpose of these notes is to give a concise and as self-contained as possible an introduction to the "variational approach”. A large part of necessary background material, such as definitions and results from the theory of Hilbert spaces, are included in appendices.