Stochastic Flows of SDEs with Irregular Coefficients and Stochastic Transport Equations

Xicheng Zhang

Published 2009-07-28, updated 2009-08-18Version 3

In this article we study (possibly degenerate) stochastic differential equations (SDE) with irregular (or discontiuous) coefficients, and prove that under certain conditions on the coefficients, there exists a unique almost everywhere stochastic (invertible) flow associated with the SDE in the sense of Lebesgue measure. In the case of constant diffusions and BV drifts, we obtain such a result by studying the related stochastic transport equation. In the case of non-constant diffusions and Sobolev drifts, we use a direct method. In particular, we extend the recent results on ODEs with non-smooth vector fields to SDEs. Moreover, we also give a criterion for the existence of invariant measures for the associated transition semigroup.