In this article we derive rigorously amplitude equations for stochastic PDEs
with quadratic nonlinearities, under the assumption that the noise acts only on
the stable modes and for an appropriate scaling between the distance from
bifurcation and the strength of the noise. We show that, due to the presence of
two distinct timescales in our system, the noise (which acts only on the fast
modes) gets transmitted to the slow modes and, as a result, the amplitude
equation contains both additive and multiplicative noise.
As an application we study the case of the one dimensional Burgers equation
forced by additive noise in the orthogonal subspace to its dominant modes. The
theory developed in the present article thus allows to explain theoretically
some recent numerical observations from [Rob03]
