The Yang-Mills heat flow with random distributional initial data

Abstract We construct local solutions to the Yang–Mills heat flow (in the DeTurck gauge) for a certain class of random distributional initial data, which includes the 3D Gaussian free field. The main idea, which goes back to work of Bourgain as well as work of Da Prato–Debussche, is to decompose the solution into a rougher linear part and a smoother nonlinear part, and to control the latter by probabilistic arguments. In a companion work, we use the main results of this paper to propose a way toward the construction of 3D Yang–Mills measures.