The scaling limit for a stochastic PDE and the separation of phases

We investigate the problem of singular perturbation for a reaction-diffusion equation with additive noise (or a stochastic partial differential equation of Ginzburg-Landau type) under the situation that the reaction term is determined by a potential with double-wells of equal depth. As the parameter ε (the temperature of the system) tends to 0, the solution converges to one of the two stable phases and consequently the phase separation is formed in the limit. We derive a stochastic differential equation which describes the random movement of the phase separation point. The proof consists of two main steps. We show that the solution stays near a manifold M^ε of minimal energy configurations based on a Lyapunov type argument. Then, the limit equation is identified by introducing a nice coordinate system in a neighborhood of M^ε.