On the strong Feller property of the heat equation on quantum graphs with Kirchhoff noise

Abstract We consider a so-called quantum graph with standard continuity and Kirchhoff vertex conditions where the Kirchhoff vertex condition is perturbed by Gaussian noise. We show that the quantum graph setting is very different from the classical one dimensional boundary noise setting, where the transition semigroup is known to be strong Feller, by giving examples and counterexamples to the strong Feller property. In particular, when the graph is a tree, and there is noise present in all of the boundary vertices except one, then the transition semigroup associated with the problem is strong Feller at any time $$T&gt;0$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>T</mml:mi> <mml:mo>&gt;</mml:mo> <mml:mn>0</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> . This turns out to be also a necessary condition for equilateral star graphs. We also comment on the existence and uniqueness of the invariant measure and the regularity of the solution.