Collapse of attractors for ODEs under small random perturbations

Abstract

This paper concerns comparisons between attractors for random dynamical systems and their corresponding noiseless systems. It is shown that if a random dynamical system has negative time trajectories that are transient or explode with probability one, then the random attractor cannot contain any open set. The result applies to any Polish space and when applied to autonomous stochastic differential equations with additive noise requires only a mild dissipation of the drift. Additionally, following observations from numerical simulations in a previous paper, analytical results are presented proving that the random global attractors for a class of gradient-like stochastic differential equations consist of a single random point. Comparison with the noiseless system reveals that arbitrarily small non-degenerate additive white noise causes the deterministic global attractor, which may have non-zero dimension, to ‘collapse’. Unlike existing results of this type, no order preserving property is necessary.