Analysis of a positivity-preserving splitting scheme for some nonlinear stochastic heat equations

Abstract: We construct a positivity-preserving Lie--Trotter splitting scheme with finite difference discretization in space for approximating the solutions to a class of nonlinear stochastic heat equations with multiplicative space-time white noise. We prove that this explicit numerical scheme converges in the mean-square sense, with rate $1/4$ in time and rate $1/2$ in space, under appropriate CFL conditions. Numerical experiments illustrate the superiority of the proposed numerical scheme compared with standard numerical methods which do not preserve positivity.