Widely degenerate anisotropic diffusion: local boundedness and semicontinuity

Abstract

We investigate the regularity of local weak solutions to evolution equations of the form \[ \partial_{t}u\,=\,\sum_{i=1}^{n}\,\partial_{x_{i}}\left[a_{i}(x,t)\,(\vert\partial_{x_{i}}u\vert-δ_{i})_{+}^{p_{i}-1}\,\frac{\partial_{x_{i}}u}{\vert\partial_{x_{i}}u\vert}\right]\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\mathrm{in}\,\,\,Ω_{T}\,=\,Ω\times(0,T)\,, \] where $\hat{I}\text{c◯}$ is a bounded domain in ${\mathbb{R}}^n$ with $n\ge 2$, the coefficients $a_i$ are measurable and bounded, $p_i>1$ and $\hat{I}{´}_i\ge 0$ are fixed parameters. Under suitable assumptions on the exponents $p_i$, we first show that the local boundedness of weak solutions follows from their membership in an appropriate non-homogeneous parabolic De Giorgi class. We then establish the existence of semicontinuous representatives for local weak sub(super)-solutions. Our analysis extends analogous results available for less degenerate operators and generalizes the local boundedness results obtained in [7] to fully anisotropic, widely degenerate parabolic PDEs with non-smooth coefficients depending additionally on the space-time variables $(x,t)$, whose growth is governed by a family of exponents $p_i$ rather than by a single exponent.