Global Calderon-Zygmund estimates for irregular double-phase evolution problem with non-divergence data

Abstract

We study irregular double-phase parabolic equations with variable exponents and non-divergence data, \[ u_t-\operatorname{div} \left(\mathcal{F}(z,\nabla u)\nabla u \right)=f(z),\quad z=(x,t)\in Q_T:=\Omega\times (0,T), \] under the homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Here, $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^N$, $N \geq 2$, is a bounded domain, $T>0$, \[ \mathcal{F}(z,\nabla u)=a(z)|\nabla u|^{p(z)-2} + b(z) |\nabla u |^{q(z)-2} \] with given Lipschitz-continuous exponents $p,q$ that satisfy a suitable balance condition. The nonnegative coefficients $a(z), b(z)$ satisfy the inequality $a(z)+b(z)>0$ in $Q_T$, the space and time derivatives of $a$ and $b$ belong to $L^d(Q_T)$ with some $d$ depending on the data. If \[ f\in L^\sigma(Q_T) \quad \text{for} \ \sigma \in (2, N+2] \quad \text{and} \quad \mathcal{F}((\cdot,0),\nabla u_0)\,|\nabla u_0|^{r+2}\in L^1(\Omega), \] where \(0\le r\le K(N,\sigma,p,q)\) if \(\sigma<N+2\), while \(r\ge0\) is arbitrary if \(\sigma=N+2\), then the problem has a unique strong solution, for which we prove the global transfer of integrability from the initial data and the forcing term to the double-phase flux in the spirit of Calder\'on-Zygmund theory, higher integrability of the gradient, and the second-order space regularity: \[ \begin{split} & \text{$\mathcal{F}((\cdot,t),\nabla u(\cdot,t))|\nabla u(\cdot,t)|^{r+2}\in L^1(\Omega)$ for a.e. $t\in (0,T)$}, \\ & \text{$|\nabla u|^{2(\min\{p(z),q(z)\}-1)+r+s}\in L^1(Q_T)$ for every $s\in\left(0,\frac{4}{N+2}\right)$}, \\ & \mathcal{F}(z,\nabla u)|\nabla u|^{\frac{r+2}{2}} \in L^2(0,T;W^{1,2}(\Omega)). \end{split} \] The results improve and complement the results in \cite{Arora-Shmarev-JGA-2026} and extend them to the full range $r \geq 0$.