End point gradient estimates for quasilinear parabolic equations with variable exponent growth on nonsmooth domains

Abstract

In this paper, we study quasilinear parabolic equations with the nonlinearity structure modeled after the $p(x,t)$-Laplacian on nonsmooth domains. The main goal is to obtain end point Calder\'on-Zygmund type estimates in the variable exponent setting. In a recent work \cite{byun2016nonlinear}, the estimates obtained were strictly above the natural exponent $p(x,t)$ and hence there was a gap between the natural energy estimates and the estimates above $p(x,t)$ (see \eqref{energy} and \eqref{byunok}). Here, we bridge this gap to obtain the end point case of the estimates obtained in \cite{byun2016nonlinear}. To this end, we make use of the parabolic Lipschitz truncation developed in \cite{KL} and obtain significantly improved a priori estimates below the natural exponent with stability of the constants. An important feature of the techniques used here is that we make use of the unified intrinsic scaling introduced in \cite{adimurthi2018sharp}, which enables us to handle both the singular and degenerate cases simultaneously.