A Variable Coefficient Free Boundary Problem for $L^p$-solvability of Parabolic Dirichlet Problems in Graph Domains

Abstract

We investigate variable coefficient analogs of a recent work of Bortz, Hofmann, Martell and Nystr\"om [BHMN25]. In particular, we show that if $\Omega$ is the region above the graph of a Lip(1,1/2) (parabolic Lipschitz) function and $L$ is a parabolic operator in divergence form \[L = \partial_t - \text{div} A \nabla\] with $A$ satisfying an $L^1$ Carleson condition on its spatial and time derivatives, then the $L^p$-solvability of the Dirichlet problem for $L$ and $L^*$ implies that the graph function has a half-order time derivative in BMO. Equivalently, the graph is parabolic uniformly rectifiable. In the case of $A$ symmetric, we only require that the Dirichlet problem for $L$ is solvable, which requires us to adapt a clever integration by parts argument by Lewis and Nystr\"om. A feature of the present work is that we must overcome the lack of translation invariance in our equation, which is a fundamental tool in similar works, including [BHMN25].