We investigate the stability of traveling-pulse solutions to the stochastic FitzHugh-Nagumo equations with additive noise. Special attention is given to the effect of small noise on the classical deterministically stable traveling pulse. Our method is based on adapting the velocity of the traveling wave by solving a stochastic ordinary differential equation (SODE) and tracking perturbations to the wave meeting a stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) coupled to an ordinary differential equation (ODE). This approach has been employed by Kruger and Stannat for scalar stochastic bistable reaction-diffusion equations such as the Nagumo equation. A main difference in our situation of an SPDE coupled to an ODE is that the linearization around the traveling wave is not self-adjoint anymore, so that fluctuations around the wave cannot be expected to be orthogonal in a corresponding inner product. We demonstrate that this problem can be overcome by making use of Riesz instead of orthogonal spectral projections. We expect that our approach can also be applied to traveling waves and other patterns in more general situations such as systems of SPDEs that are not self-adjoint. This provides a major generalization as these systems are prevalent in many applications.
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