Bifurcations and Early-Warning Signs for SPDEs with Spatial Heterogeneity

Abstract: Bistability is a key property of many systems arising in the nonlinear sciences. For example, it appears in many partial differential equations (PDEs). For scalar bistable reaction-diffusions PDEs, the bistable case even has take on different names within communities such as Allee, Allen-Cahn, Chafee-Infante, Nagumo, Ginzburg-Landau, $\Phi_4$, Schl\"ogl, Stommel, just to name a few structurally similar bistable model names. One key mechanism, how bistability arises under parameter variation is a pitchfork bifurcation. In particular, taking the pitchfork bifurcation normal form for reaction-diffusion PDEs is yet another variant within the family of PDEs mentioned above. More generally, the study of this PDE class considering steady states and stability, related to bifurcations due to a parameter is well-understood for the deterministic case. For the stochastic PDE (SPDE) case, the situation is less well-understood and has been studied recently. In this paper we generalize and unify several recent results for SPDE bifurcations. Our generalisation is motivated directly by applications as we introduce in the equation a spatially heterogeneous term and relax the assumptions on the covariance operator that defines the noise. For this spatially heterogeneous SPDE, we prove a finite-time Lyapunov exponent bifurcation result. Furthermore, we extend the theory of early warning signs in our context and we explain, the role of universal exponents between covariance operator warning signs and the lack of finite-time Lyapunov uniformity. Our results are accompanied and cross-validated by numerical simulations.