Analyticity and sparsity in uncertainty quantification for PDEs with Gaussian random field inputs

We establish sparsity and summability results for coefficient sequences of Wiener-Hermite polynomial chaos expansions of countably-parametric solutions of linear elliptic and parabolic divergence-form partial differential equations with Gaussian random field inputs. The novel proof technique developed here is based on analytic continuation of parametric solutions into the complex domain. It differs from previous works that used bootstrap arguments and induction on the differentiation order of solution derivatives with respect to the parameters. The present holomorphy-based argument allows a unified, ``differentiation-free'' proof of sparsity (expressed in terms of $\ell^{p$-summability} or weighted $\ell^{2$-summability)} of sequences of Wiener-Hermite coefficients in polynomial chaos expansions in various scales of function spaces. The analysis also implies corresponding analyticity and sparsity results for posterior densities in Bayesian inverse problems subject to Gaussian priors on uncertain inputs from function spaces. Our results furthermore yield dimension-independent convergence rates of various \emph{constructive} high-dimensional deterministic numerical approximation schemes such as single-level and multi-level versions of Hermite-Smolyak anisotropic sparse-grid interpolation and quadrature in both forward and inverse computational uncertainty quantification.