Pointwise estimates via parabolic potentials for a class of doubly nonlinear parabolic equations with measure data

On a cylindrical domain $$E_T$$ET, we consider doubly nonlinear parabolic equations, whose prototype is $$\partial _t u - \mathrm{div}(|u|^{m-1}|Du|^{p-2}Du) = \mu ,$$∂tu-div(|u|m-1|Du|p-2Du)=μ, where $$\mu $$μ is a non-negative Radon measure having finite total mass $$\mu (E_T)$$μ(ET). The central objective is to establish pointwise estimates for weak solutions in terms of nonlinear parabolic potentials in the doubly degenerate case $$(p\ge 2, m>1)$$(p≥2,m>1). Moreover, we will prove the sharpness of the estimates by giving an optimal Lorentz space criterion regarding the local uniform boundedness of weak solutions and by comparing them to the decay of the Barenblatt solution.


Introduction and main result
In this paper, we study potential estimates for doubly nonlinear parabolic equations with measure data. Such equations arise in the field of plasma physics, ground water surveys, or the motion of viscous fluids, but also in the modeling of an ideal gas flowing isoentropically in a homogeneous porous medium. In this introductory section, we describe the treated problem and specify some notations. Further, we explain the notion of weak solutions, mention the main results, and comment on the proof strategies as well as the history of potential estimates.

Setting
We consider a class of nonhomogeneous doubly nonlinear parabolic equations in a space-time cylinder E T := E × (0, T ), where E ⊂ R n is an open bounded set, n ≥ 2, T > 0, and μ ∈ M + (E T ) is a non-negative Radon measure on E T with finite total mass μ(E T ) < ∞.
Our aim is to establish pointwise estimates in terms of nonlinear parabolic potentials, where the main tasks are to identify the decent potential for the doubly nonlinear parabolic context and to construct intrinsic cylinders that suitably reflect the geometry of the equations under consideration. The optimality of our estimates will be explained by deducing a sharp Lorentz space criterion for μ providing the local boundedness of u, and by comparing the behavior of the potential to the decay of the Barenblatt fundamental solution.
Throughout this paper, the vector field A : E T × R × R n → R n is assumed to be a Carathéodory function, i. e. it is measurable with respect to (x, t) ∈ E T for all (u, ξ) ∈ R × R n and continuous with respect to (u, ξ) ∈ R × R n for almost every (x, t) ∈ E T . Moreover, we want A to satisfy the ellipticity condition A(x, t, u, ξ) · ξ ≥ C 0 |u| m−1 |ξ | p , (1.2) together with the growth condition for any u ∈ R, ξ ∈ R n , and almost every (x, t) ∈ E T , where C 0 > 0 and C 1 > 0 are fixed constants, p ≥ 2 and m > 1.

Some remarks on doubly nonlinear parabolic equations
The model example for equations treated in the sequel is given by the doubly nonlinear parabolic equation whose modulus of ellipticity is |u| m−1 |Du| p−2 . For p > 2, m > 1, this quantity vanishes if u or |Du| become 0, which is why we call the equation doubly degenerate, whereas in the singular-degenerate situation p < 2, m > 1, the coefficient |Du| p−2 tends to ∞ and |u| m−1 → 0 as |u| → 0, |Du| → 0. According to that approach, the cases p > 2, m < 1 and p < 2, m < 1 are named degenerate-singular and doubly singular, respectively. Apart from that, one can categorize the solutions with regard to their support after finite time and speed of propagation, where the equation is referred to as of the type of slow, normal, or fast diffusion, depending on whether p + m is larger than, equal to, or less than 3. Both classifications can also be found in [17, p. 23]. Lately, several authors examined doubly nonlinear parabolic equations because of their physical and mathematical interest, though, substantial parts of the recent research were not on equations of the above universal form, but rather on specific examples like (1.4) with either μ ≡ 0, p + m = 3, or other simplifications of (1.1). For instance, Hölder regularity and Harnack's inequality for bounded weak solutions were established in [16,17,34,44] and [24,43]. What is more, [33,35,40] are concerned with the asymptotic behavior of solutions to doubly nonlinear parabolic equations for certain values of the quantity p + m, and the local boundedness of the gradient of a solution to the homogeneous equation was shown in [36] under the additional assumption that u is strictly positive. Existence and uniqueness results for the Cauchy-Dirichlet problem with an inhomogeneity μ ∈ L ∞ (E T , R ≥0 ) were developed in [18][19][20] and generalized in [38,39] to Lebesgue integrable functions and Radon measures as right-hand sides.
However, since the proof strategies are quite sophisticated due to the inherent difficulty of a double nonlinearity, the achievements, especially for the measurevalued equation, are relatively sparse, and, to the author's knowledge, there is no theory for potential estimates regarding doubly nonlinear parabolic equations in the literature up to now. Nevertheless, single special cases of (1.1) like the porous medium equation ( p = 2) or the p-Laplacian equation (m = 1) have been intensively studied and we refer the interested reader to [9,21,41,42] and the lists of references therein.

Notations
As to the notation, we always write z = (x, t) for a point z ∈ R n+1 ∼ = R n × R. As is customary, we call q := q q−1 ∈ [1, ∞] the Hölder conjugate of q ∈ [1, ∞]. By {u > }, we express the superlevel set {(x, t) ∈ E T : u(x, t) > } where the function u exceeds the level > 0, and we address the positive part of u as u + := max{u, 0}. We denote the weak spatial derivative of the function u by ∂t is the operator for the time derivative. Besides, by M + (E T ), we mean the set of all non-negative Radon measures, and c ≡ c(·) stands for a constant, which may vary from line to line and depend only on the parameters in brackets. Finally, for (x 0 , t 0 ) ∈ E T , r, θ > 0, and ν > 0, we define the parabolic cylinder and write ν Q r,θ := Q νr,ν p θ for its rescaled associate.

Weak solutions
In this section, we specify the notion of weak solutions to the Cauchy-Dirichlet problem associated to the doubly nonlinear parabolic equation (1.1), which is given by is termed a weak solution to the Cauchy-Dirichlet problem (1.6) if and only if the identity holds true for any testing function In (1.8), the symbol Du has to be understood in the sense of Remark 1.2. For the interested reader, we remark that, apart from our definition of weak solutions, which is also employed in [15,19,33,35,39,42,44], for instance, there is another concept of weak solutions in the context of doubly nonlinear parabolic equations (see [4,10,18,38]), where our regularity assumptions (1.7) are replaced by with α := m−1 p .

Main results
We now state the central results of this paper. The parabolic potential P μ p appearing in the following theorem was originally introduced in [31], where potential estimates of the form (1.10) were proven for the evolutionary p-Laplacian; see also Sect. 1.7 for a discussion of the history of potential estimates. The proof of Theorem 1.3 will be performed in Sect. 4.
holds with a constant c ≡ c(n, m, p, C 0 , C 1 , λ). The parabolic potential P μ p will be defined in Sect. 2.1.
A few remarks on the above theorem are necessary. First, the additional assumption r 2 ≤ θ in the case p = 2 guarantees that the condition Q r,ωr p (z 0 ) ⊂ E T in (2.2) is satisfied for ω = 1; see Sect. 2.1 for the details.
Next, the sharpness of the potential estimate (1.10) can be seen, for example, by looking at the fundamental solution B m, p , which is the explicit very weak solution to the equation with δ being the Dirac measure charging the origin in R n+1 . According to [14,Sect. 2] or [41,Sect. 12.2.1], the so-called Barenblatt solution is given by 1) , and C > 0. Our estimate shows the correct decay at the origin in the sense that it reflects the same structure as B m, p . More precisely, we can directly read off from (1.11) that the Barenblatt solution satisfies for t 0 > 0, and we will prove in Sect. 5 that the potential P δ p from Theorem 1.3 provides in (1.10) the same behavior at the origin as exhibited by B m, p . Under this point of view, it means that our pointwise estimate is the best possible.
Moreover, we can infer from (1.10) that u ∈ L ∞ loc (E T ) for weak solutions u to the Cauchy-Dirichlet problem (1.6), given that there exists a radius r > 0 such that z → P μ p (z; r ) is locally bounded in E T . In particular, Theorem 1.3 allows us to formulate a sharp Lorentz space criterion, which ensures the local boundedness of the potential P  , however, the problem is that a Lorentz space criterion with possibly negative exponents is deduced. It seems that major modifications in their argumentation are necessary to ensure the well-definedness of the condition appearing there. Our Theorem 1.4 gives the desired result, not only for the evolutionary p-Laplacian, but even for doubly nonlinear parabolic equations. The exponent q 1 in (1.13) is optimal, which indicates the optimality of the potential P μ p in (1.10). The minimality of q 1 can be retrieved, for instance, from [9, Rem. 3.1, p. 122].
Coming back to Theorem 1.3, we note that the existence of a weak solution cannot be guaranteed as long as a general Radon measure μ ∈ M + (E T ) without any further qualities is considered. Using u α+1 in the regularity assumptions (see Remark 1.2), the existence of less regular very weak solutions to the Cauchy-Dirichlet problem (1.6) was established in [39] under the additional monotonicity condition one can prove the existence of weak solutions in the sense of (1.9) (see [39,Rem. 4.3]), whereas [38] supplies the existence of weak solutions in the sense of Defini- Hence, the pointwise bound (1.10) has to be interpreted as an a priori estimate. By an approximation argument (see [4,Chap. 7]), the regularity result (1.10) can be transferred to very weak solutions.

Proof strategies
Our proof techniques are an adaption of the methods launched in [23] for elliptic p-Laplacian equations and [4][5][6][29][30][31][32] for the parabolic setting of equations of p-Laplacian and porous medium type. Our result, Theorem 1.3, is in perfect accordance with the ones from those papers and it is based on the notion of the parabolic potential P μ p defined in Sect. 2.1 (see also [31]) and a sophisticated construction of intrinsic cylinders (see (3.2)). The intrinsic scaling approach was introduced by DiBenedetto (see [9]) and reflects the lack of homogeneity of the problem by rescaling the dimensions of the cylinders to compensate the degeneracy of the considered equation. In our context, i. e. in the case of a doubly nonlinear parabolic equation like (1.4), the appropriate intrinsic correction is a 1−m d 2− p r p , where a neutralizes the degeneracy of u, and the factor d makes up for the absence of homogeneity with regard to |Du|.
The proof of the pointwise estimate (1.10) consists of establishing a Caccioppoli type inequality on such intrinsic cylinders in Sect. 3 and choosing adequate sequences of numbers a j and d j (see Sect. 4). Applying the energy estimate, we will receive a uniform estimate from above for a j by iteration of recursive bounds. One of the key ingredients when proving the latter is the growth bound (4.10), which allows to replace d j by d j−1 and is, to the author's knowledge, new in the literature (a similar argument for a j was used in [5,Sect. 4.2]). In the end, we will have shown that u(z 0 ) can be bounded from above by the limit a ∞ , which will prove Theorem 1.3.

Potential estimates
The research on potential estimates was initiated by [22,23] with the investigation of solutions to stationary p-Laplacian equations. Since then, the outcome was extended in various respects, which we will briefly comment on in the following. In the case m = 1, p = 2, we almost arrive at the linear parabolic zero order Riesz potential estimate from [13]. The only difference springs from the integral , where the parameter λ > 0 can be chosen arbitrarily small, but we are not permitted to let λ 0 because the constant c blows up in the limit. However, this curiosity is not new and conforms with the prominent estimates for p-Laplacian and porous medium type equations discussed below where the classical bound cannot be completely recovered by letting λ 0 as well. Next, for m = 1, our conclusion reduces to the known estimate from [31] for the degenerate situation of the parabolic p-Laplacian equation. Earlier, an analogue for time-independent Radon measures was derived in [32], and pointwise estimates in the singular p-Laplacian context involving a Radon measure defined on E can be found in [29]. Setting p = 2 in (1.10), the pointwise estimates for degenerate porous medium type equations from [4,30] can be reattained. Note that our estimate and the one from [4] do not comprise the sup-term from [30] on the right-hand side. Seen from this perspective, they are more natural since the famous bound from [2] can be retrieved in the case μ ≡ 0. In [37], the results for degenerate porous medium type equations were generalized in the sense that vector fields A satisfying even more universal structure conditions were treated, and, recently, also the singular range for porous medium type equations could be coped with (see [5,6]). Nevertheless, potential estimates for doubly nonlinear parabolic equations are not covered in the literature up to now. Finally, we shall mention that all results presented here are estimates for the solution u itself, and we refer the reader to [25][26][27][28] for gradient estimates for the p-Laplacian, which we will not dwell on in this paper.

Preliminaries
In this section, we will provide various tools, which will be needed later in the proof. We will display the parabolic potential initially introduced in [31], cite an evolutionary version of the Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequality, analyze some auxiliary functions, define a time mollification procedure for functions in L 1 (E T ), and list the basic knowledge as regards Lorentz function spaces.

Nonlinear parabolic potentials
For the construction of the parabolic potential P μ p , we first define the mapping and observe that p → i p (ω) is continuous for any fixed ω > 0. Next, we remember the definition of the parabolic cylinders from (1.5) and set for a point z 0 ∈ E T and a radius r > 0. Obviously, for small radii r > 0 such that Q r,r 2 (z 0 ) ⊂ E T , we have D μ 2 (z 0 ; r ) = r −n μ(Q r,r 2 (z 0 )). Moreover, for p > 2, we note that the infimum in (2.2) is attained at some ω > 0 because the function under the infimum is continuous in ω, and ω is bounded since E T is bounded. We remark that our definition of D μ p differs in a factor 1 2 from the definition in [31] as forward-backward cylinders of the form B r (x 0 ) × (t 0 − θ, t 0 + θ) are considered there, and the condition Q r,ωr p (z 0 ) ⊂ E T in (2.2) is implicitly assumed also in [31]. Furthermore, we note that the scaling factor r p in time is typical when dealing with estimates for u as opposed to gradient estimates where the canonic scaling is r 2 . Finally, we define the nonlinear parabolic potential P μ p with respect to the Radon measure μ by where the sequence of radii (r j ) j∈N 0 is given by r j := r 2 j for any j ∈ N 0 . We realize that for any r > 0 small enough, which is why there exists some constant c > 1 such that i. e. for p = 2, the parabolic potential P μ 2 is equivalent to the truncated Riesz potential from [4][5][6]13,28,30]. If μ is independent of time, the infimum in (2.2) is attained at which means that P μ p equals the elliptic Wolff potential as defined in [31], which is in turn equivalent to the elliptic Wolff potential in integral notation from [12,13,22,23,27,29,32]. In the light of the foregoing comments, our definition of the parabolic potential P μ p is natural because it reduces to the parabolic Riesz potential as p 2 and, for any p ≥ 2, to the known elliptic Wolff potential when the Radon measure μ is time-independent. Beyond that, the usage of the potential P μ p is justified in view of the facts that it allows to retrieve from Theorem 1.3 the behavior of the Barenblatt solution (see Sect. 5) and grants sharp Lorentz space estimates (see Theorem 1.4). Note that our potential does not depend on the value of m, which harmonizes with the prior estimates for porous medium type equations (see [4][5][6]30]).

Auxiliary lemmata
In this section, we will study some auxiliary functions. Before that, we cite a parabolic Sobolev embedding (cf. [9, Prop. 3.1, p. 7]), which we will employ in Sect. 4.5.

4)
where q is given by q = p(n+ ) n .
Next, we define the auxiliary functions G λ , V λ and W λ , which will turn up later in the proof.

Definition 2.2.
For λ ∈ (0, 1) and s ≥ 0, we define the functions G λ , V λ and W λ by We now mention one lemma for each of those auxiliary functions containing some characteristics, which are required afterwards. The proofs can be adapted from [ and and p−1−λ in the limit ε 0.

Mollification in time
We will now introduce an averaging process in time and on its basis develop the regularized version (2.10) of the weak formulation (1.8).

Definition 2.6.
For v ∈ L 1 (E T ), we define the mollification in time by For the main properties of this mollification, we refer to [7, Appendix B] and remark that · h has similar characteristics as · h . In particular, we remember that, for u ∈ L p (E T ), we have ∂ t u h ∈ L p (E T ), and the identity for any testing function ϕ ∈ C ∞ (E T ) with compact support in E T .

Lorentz spaces
In this section, we assume that ⊂ R d is a measurable set, and L d denotes the Lebesgue measure on (R d , B(R d )). . In the case = E T , we can take U ⊂ E and 0 ≤ t 1 < t 2 ≤ T , and define the Lorentz-Bochner space L p,q U ; L p,q ((t 1 , t 2 )) as the space of all functions (u(x))(t) := u(x, t) such that As is customary, we identify u with u and do not distinguish between them in the notation. Lorentz spaces refine the classical Lebesgue function spaces since L p, p ( ) = L p ( ) for p > 1. For the interested reader, there is a wide-ranging literature on the properties of Lorentz spaces; see for instance [1,Chap. 7]. In particular, we will need the inclusions for any measurable set A ⊂ .

Energy estimates
In this chapter, we will establish a Caccioppoli type inequality. For that purpose, let z 0 = (x 0 , t 0 ) ∈ E T be a fixed point, a, d > 0, and define This parameter will compensate the constant in (4.6) arising from the definition of i p in (2.1). We will work on intrinsic parabolic cylinders with the structure These cylinders are natural as they take into account the scaling behavior of the considered doubly nonlinear parabolic equations. Henceforth, we will use the abbreviations B := B (x 0 ), ( where the necessity of choosing the value of ν that way will become comprehensible when proving (4.7). In the remainder of this chapter, we will show the following inequality.
holds with a constant c ≡ c( p, C 0 , C 1 , λ), where G λ , V λ and W λ are given in Definition 2.2.
Proof. In the regularized weak formulation (2.10), we choose the testing function ]. Furthermore, we denote by ζ the pointwise limit of ζ ε as ε 0. In the sequel, we will analyze all terms appearing in Lemma 2.7. As g is increasing, the identity (2.9) implies First, we will turn towards the integral II(h, ε). Passing to the limits ε 0 and h 0, we receive for a. e. τ ∈ (a,d) ν due to the Lebesgue differentiation theorem. Next, in order to find a bound for the term I(h), we note that η ≤ 1 and d) is such that u h (z) < a, the function g vanishes on the whole interval u h (z), a , and otherwise, we can estimate |g| ≤ 1. Now, we can treat I(h) by using the above inequality and subsequently letting h 0. This results in dz with a constant c ≡ c( p), where we observe that u > a on Q (a,d) ,+ and (1 + λ)( p − 1) ≥ 1 for the last step. In the following, we will deal with the diffusion part from (2.10). Again building the limits ε 0 and h 0, we get Before considering the term IV, we will treat the integral III. Having in mind the ellipticity assumption (1.2), we compute for the latter For the other summand, we exploit in turn the fact that |v| ≤ 1, the growth condition (1.3), the bound |Dη| ≤ 2 (1−ν) , Young's inequality, and |ζ | ≤ 1 to conclude that dz with a constant c ≡ c( p, C 0 , C 1 , λ). It remains to estimate the integral involving the Radon measure μ, where we use |ϕ| ≤ 1 to derive ,+ .
Combining the results obtained so far and modifying the domains of integration of the left-hand side integrals in a way that we can discard the cut-off functions η and ζ , we receive for a. e. τ ∈ (a,d) ν with a constant c ≡ c( p, C 0 , C 1 , λ). Building the supremum over all τ in the first and letting τ t 0 in the second term, we infer that can be bounded from above up to a constant by the right-hand side of (3.5). Then, taking into account that on the set Q (a,d) ν ,+ there holds

Potential estimates: the proof of Theorem 1.3
Proof of Theorem 1.3. In this section, we will perform the proof of Theorem 1.3. We will proceed as described in Sect. 1.6.

Choice of parameters
Let z 0 = (x 0 , t 0 ) ∈ E T be an arbitrary point and r, θ > 0 such that Q r,θ ≡ Q r,θ (z 0 ) E T with the additional assumption r 2 ≤ θ when p = 2. Moreover, let λ ∈ (0, 1 n ], and κ ∈ (0, 1) be a fixed parameter, which will be specified later.  for π p as in (3.1), and suppose for some j ∈ N 0 that a k and d k−1 have already been selected for any 0 ≤ k ≤ j. In order to choose a j+1 and d j , we recall the definitions of i p and D μ p from (2.1) and (2.2), and let with ν as in (3.3). We remark that, for a fixed j ∈ N 0 , such a number ω j exists by the very definition of D μ p , and ω j is uniformly bounded with respect to j by the assumption 1 ν Q r j ,ωr p j ⊂ E T and the fact that r j ≤ r for any j ∈ N 0 . Moreover, we setd and define and and L j (t) := B j ∩ {u(·, t) > a j } for t ∈ j . Eventually, we set a j+1 := a j + d j and become aware of the fact that

Cylinder inclusions
To start with, we claim that for any j ∈ N 0 , where ν is as in (3.3). The second inclusion is obvious from the definition of ω j from (4.2), and, since a j ≥ a 0 ≥ 1 and d j ≥ i p (ω j ), the first inclusion is a consequence of Next, we will show that for any j ∈ N 0 and ν as in (3.3). Clearly, there holds B r j+1 ⊂ B νr j , and, as a j+1 ≥ a j , d j+1 ≥d j+1 ≥ 1 2 d j , and r j+1 = 1 2 r j , we also know that such that (4.7) is proven. Finally, we will argue that for any j ∈ N 0 . By an inductive application of (4.7), we find that Q j ⊂ Q 0 . Hence, (4.8) follows once we have asserted Q 0 ⊂ Q r,θ . However, this relation results from the inequality where we have inserted (4.1).

Growth bounds for d j
In this section, we will assume that and establish the growth bound for any j ∈ N, where c * := 2 For that purpose, we use the definition of K j from (4.3) and the facts that r j = 1 2 r j−1 and a j ≥ a j−1 to compute the last integral can be bounded from above by K j−1 (d j−1 ), which is in turn smaller than or equal to κ by virtue of (4.4). Thus, in view of (4.9), we have proven that K j (c * d j−1 ) ≤ K j (d j ), which implies (4.10) since K j is a decreasing function.

Preliminary estimates
For any j ∈ N, the estimates hold true on the set {u > a j } by the definitions of a j and d j . Until the end of this section, we will again assume that (4.9) is valid for any j ∈ N. Hence, due to (4.11), (4.10), the induction hypotheses r j = 1 2 r j−1 and L j ⊂ L j−1 , and the inequality with constants c ≡ c(n, m, p, λ) and c ε ≡ c ε (n, m, p, C 0 , C 1 , λ, ε). Choosing ε such that cε (1+λ)( p−1) = 1 6 , then ε 1 such that c ε ε pλ 1 = 1 6 , and lastly κ such that c ε ε − pλ 1 κ pλ = 1 6 ensures that ε, ε 1 , κ ∈ (0, 1) only depend on n, m, p, C 0 , C 1 and λ, and the preceding inequality simplifies to with a constant c ≡ c(n, m, p, C 0 , C 1 , λ). Distinguishing the cases μ( 1 ν Q j ) ≤ d j r n j and μ( 1 ν Q j ) > d j r n j , we observe that (4.21) and (4.5) imply d j ≤ cr −n j μ 1 ν Q r j ,ω j r p j such that (4.15) follows. In the remainder of this section, we will explain the bound (4.16) for d 0 . Exactly as in the argument for j ≥ 1, we can assume that d 0 >d 0 . In particular, this means that we can take for granted that we have K 0 (d 0 ) = κ, which is equivalent to We note that (1 + λ)( p − 1) − ( p − 2) = 1 + λ( p − 1) is positive and use the estimate u − a 0 < u, valid on the domain of integration. Furthermore, we employ (4.8) and recall that κ only depends on n, m, p, C 0 , C 1 and λ. Hence, we receive , which proves (4.16). existence of a number R > 0 such that Q r,ω r r p (z 0 ) E T holds for any r ∈ (0, R). First, by (2.13), we deduce t 0 t 0 −ω r r p μ(x, t) dt ≤ ω r r p μ * * (x, ω r r p ) ≤ (ω r r p ) n n+ p μ L q 1 ,∞ (J ε ) (x)
Therefore, we can find a radius R > 0 such that the choice ω r = r ψ 1 μ * * L q 1 ,∞ (J ε ) (α n r n ) ψ 2 (6.2) is admissible in (6.1) for any r ∈ (0, R). To obtain an upper bound for the potential P μ p , we insert ω r as in (6.2) in (6.1) and integrate the inequality with respect to r . Then, the first term on the right-hand side of (6.1) reads with a constant c ≡ c(n, p, ψ 1 ), where the inequality follows by an easy substitution. Analogously, the other summand from (6.1) can be estimated from above by