A linearly implicit finite element full-discretization scheme for SPDEs with nonglobally Lipschitz coefficients

The present article deals with strong approximations of additive noise driven stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) with nonglobally Lipschitz nonlinearity in a bounded domain $ \mathcal{D} \in{\mathbb{R}}^{d}$, $ d \leq 3$. As the first contribution, we establish the well-posedness and regularity of the considered SPDEs in space dimension $d \le 3$, under more relaxed assumptions on the stochastic convolution. This improves relevant results in the literature and covers both the space-time white noise ($d=1$) and the trace-class noises ($\text{Tr} (Q) < \infty $) in multiple dimensions $d=2,3$. Such an improvement is achieved based on a key perturbation estimate for a perturbed PDE, with the aid of which we prove the convergence and uniform regularity of a spectral approximation of the SPDEs and thus get the improved regularity results. The second contribution of the paper is to propose and analyze a spatio-temporal discretization of the SPDEs, by incorporating a standard finite element method in space and a linearly implicit nonlinearity-tamed Euler method for the temporal discretization. The proposed time-stepping scheme is linearly implicit and does not suffer from solving nonlinear algebra equations as the backward Euler scheme does. Based on the improved regularity results, we recover the expected strong convergence rates of the fully discrete scheme and reveal how the convergence rates rely on the regularity of the noise process. In particular, a classical convergence rate of order $O(h^{2} +\tau )$ can be obtained even in high dimension $d=3$, as the driven noise is of trace class and satisfies certain regularity assumptions. The optimal error estimates turn out to be challenging and face some essential difficulties when the tamed time-stepping scheme meets the finite element spatial discretization, particularly in the context of low regularity and multiple dimensions $d \le 3$. Some highly nontrivial arguments are introduced to overcome the difficulties. Finally, numerical examples corroborate the claimed strong orders of convergence.