Regularity of weak supersolutions to elliptic and parabolic equations: Lower semicontinuity and pointwise behavior

We demonstrate a measure theoretical approach to the local regularity of weak supersolutions to elliptic and parabolic equations in divergence form. In the first part, we show that weak supersolutions become lower semicontinuous after redefinition on a set of measure zero. The proof relies on a general principle, i.e. the De Giorgi type lemma, which offers a unified approach for a wide class of elliptic and parabolic equations, including an anisotropic elliptic equation, the parabolic p-Laplace equation, and the porous medium equation. In the second part, we shall show that for parabolic problems the lower semicontinuous representative at an instant can be recovered pointwise from the "ess lim inf" of past times. We also show that it can be recovered by the limit of certain integral averages of past times. The proof hinges on the expansion of positivity for weak supersolutions. Our results are structural properties of partial differential equations, independent of any kind of comparison principle. (C) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Masson SAS.