Overcoming the order barrier in the numerical approximation of stochastic partial differential equations with additive space-time noise

We consider the numerical approximation of parabolic stochastic partial differential equations driven by additive space-time white noise. We introduce a new numerical scheme for the time discretization of the finite-dimensional Galerkin stochastic differential equations, which we call the exponential Euler scheme, and show that it converges (in the strong sense) faster than the classical numerical schemes, such as the linear-implicit Euler scheme or the Crank-Nicholson scheme, for this equation with the general noise. In particular, we prove that our scheme applied to a semilinear stochastic heat equation converges with an overall computational order 1/3 which exceeds the barrier order 1/6 for numerical schemes using only basic increments of the noise process reported previously. By contrast, our scheme takes advantage of the smoothening effect of the Laplace operator and of a linear functional of the noise and, therefore overcomes this order barrier.