Widely degenerate anisotropic diffusion: local boundedness and semicontinuity

We investigate the regularity of local weak solutions to evolution equations of the form $$\partial_{t}u\,=\,\sum_{i=1}^{n}\,\partial_{x_{i}}\left[a_{i}(x,t)\,(\vert\partial_{x_{i}}u\vert-\delta_{i})_{+}^{p_{i}-1}\,\frac{\partial_{x_{i}}u}{\vert\partial_{x_{i}}u\vert}\right]\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\,\mathrm{in}\,\,\,\Omega_{T}\,=\,\Omega\times(0,T)\,,$$ where $\Omega$ is a bounded domain in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ with $n\geq2$, the coefficients $a_{i}$ are measurable and bounded, $p_{i}>1$ and $\delta_{i}\geq0$ are fixed parameters. Under suitable assumptions on the exponents $p_{i}$, we first show that the local boundedness of weak solutions follows from their membership in an appropriate non-homogeneous parabolic De Giorgi class. We then establish the existence of semicontinuous representatives for local weak sub(super)-solutions. Our analysis extends analogous results available for less degenerate operators and generalizes the local boundedness results obtained in [7] to fully anisotropic, widely degenerate parabolic PDEs with non-smooth coefficients depending additionally on the space-time variables $(x,t)$, whose growth is governed by a family of exponents $p_{i}$ rather than by a single exponent.