Fully nonlinear parabolic equations under a fixed reference diffusion:weighted $L^2$ Hessian estimates and well-posedness

Abstract

We develop a fixed-reference weighted $L^2$ theory for terminal-value fully nonlinear parabolic equations. A prescribed uniformly elliptic diffusion starting from a point determines both the linear reference operator and a space--time occupation measure; time weights of order $\alpha$ accommodate the point-start singularity. For the associated linear backward equation, we identify the optimal source-to-intrinsic-Hessian norm $C_w(X)$ and derive bounds on it from a moving-measure Bochner identity. We compute the sharp Brownian benchmark $C_{\alpha }^{\mathrm{Br}}={\sup }_{n\in \mathbb{N},n\ge 2}2\sqrt{n(n-1)}/(n-1+\alpha )$, prove that it is a universal tangent lower bound, and show that it is attained by regular weights for time-inhomogeneous affine Gaussian diffusions and is the infimum over such weights for normalized state-dependent covariances. Under the standing data and lower-order assumptions, the Hessian estimate yields our main nonlinear result: if the driver's Hessian Lipschitz constant satisfies $C_w(X)L_H<1$, then the equation has a unique weighted Sobolev solution and the Picard iteration on the source converges geometrically, with no smallness condition on the value or gradient channels. For the Brownian model at order $1/2$, counterexamples in dimensions $d\ge 7$ show that this strict threshold cannot be uniformly improved within the occupation-Sobolev class. For weights of order below one, additional spatial regularity and unweighted integrability of the data yield an unweighted spatial jet and a unique solution in the regular fixed-reference Markovian class for second-order backward stochastic differential equations (2BSDEs) defined here.