On the strong regularity of degenerate additive noise driven stochastic differential equations with respect to their initial values

Abstract Recently in [M. Hairer, M. Hutzenthaler, and A. Jentzen, Ann. Probab. 43, 2 (2015), 468–527] and [A. Jentzen, T. Muller-Gronbach, and L. Yaroslavtseva, Commun. Math. Sci. 14, 6 (2016), 1477–1500] stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with smooth coefficient functions have been constructed which have an arbitrarily slowly converging modulus of continuity in the initial value. In these SDEs it is crucial that some of the first order partial derivatives of the drift coefficient functions grow at least exponentially and, in particular, quicker than any polynomial. However, in applications SDEs do typically have coefficient functions whose first order partial derivatives are polynomially bounded. In this article we study whether arbitrarily bad regularity phenomena in the initial value may also arise in the latter case and we partially answer this question in the negative. More precisely, we show that every additive noise driven SDE which admits a Lyapunov-type condition (which ensures the existence of a unique solution of the SDE) and which has a drift coefficient function whose first order partial derivatives grow at most polynomially is at least logarithmically Holder continuous in the initial value.