  White noise-driven nonlinear stochastic partial differential equations
(SPDEs) of parabolic type are frequently used to model physical and biological
systems in space dimensions d = 1,2,3. Whereas existence and uniqueness of weak
solutions to these equations are well established in one dimension, the
situation is different for d \geq 2. Despite their popularity in the applied
sciences, higher dimensional versions of these SPDE models are generally
assumed to be ill-posed by the mathematics community. We study this discrepancy
on the specific example of the two dimensional Allen-Cahn equation driven by
additive white noise. Since it is unclear how to define the notion of a weak
solution to this equation, we regularize the noise and introduce a family of
approximations. Based on heuristic arguments and numerical experiments, we
conjecture that these approximations exhibit divergent behavior in the
continuum limit. The results strongly suggest that a series of published
numerical studies are problematic: shrinking the mesh size in these simulations
does not lead to the recovery of a physically meaningful limit.
