arXiv2026
We study sign-changing viscosity solutions of the singularly perturbed fully nonlinear equation $$ F(D^2u_\varepsilon) = \frac{\alpha}{\varepsilon} \beta\left(\frac{u_\varepsilon}{\varepsilon}\right) \qquad\text{in }B_1\subset\mathbb R^n, $$ where $F$ is uniformly elliptic and $\beta\in C_c (-1,1)$ is nonnegative. We prove the scale-sharp estimate $$ \|\nabla u_\varepsilon\|_{L^\infty(B_{1/2})} \leq C\left( \|u_\varepsilon\|_{L^\infty(B_1)}+\sqrt\alpha \right), $$ with $C$ depending only on the dimension, the ellipticity constants, and $\beta$, and independent of $\varepsilon$ and $\alpha$. This removes a longstanding compactness obstruction in the analysis of fully nonlinear two-phase singular perturbations. The difficulty is structural: at positive $\varepsilon$ there is neither a free boundary nor a prescribed transmission law, while the general fully nonlinear setting provides no monotonicity formula capable of controlling the interaction of the two phases. The proof develops a diffuse counterpart of the De Silva--Savin decay-versus-Lipschitz alternative. Exact planar transitions furnish the local comparison geometry, and curved-test compactness carries this geometry across collapsing reaction layers. An intrinsic transition-region estimate reduces the problem to linear growth from buffered level boundaries. The resulting dyadic continuation is closed by a large-slope stopping argument: bounded accumulated slopes yield the desired growth directly, whereas unbounded slopes force the effective reaction strength to vanish after normalization and lead to a contradiction. The estimate is quantitatively optimal and supplies the scale-invariant compactness framework required for the subsequent sharp-interface analysis.