Quantitative Osgood regularity for DiPerna--Lions flows

Abstract

We study the spatial regularity of regular Lagrangian flows associated with vector fields in the DiPerna--Lions class \(\boldsymbol b\in L^1((0,T);W^{1,1}_{\loc}(\mathbb R^d)), \) under the standard growth and compressibility assumptions. For vector fields in \(L^1_tW^{1,p}_{\loc,x}\), with \(p>1\), the flow \(\boldsymbol X(t,\cdot)\) is known to satisfy a quantitative local Lipschitz estimate, which implies that it is Lipschitz continuous in the Lusin sense. We prove that, at the endpoint \(p=1\), this estimate admits an Osgood-type counterpart. More precisely, we construct an increasing function \(G\), with \(G(0+)=-\infty\), determined by the integrability of \(D\boldsymbol b\), such that \[ G\bigl(|\boldsymbol X(t,x)-\boldsymbol X(t,y)|\bigr) \leq G\bigl(|\boldsymbol X(s,x)-\boldsymbol X(s,y)|\bigr) + \int_s^t \bigl(k(τ,x)+k(τ,y)\bigr)\,\ddτ, \] where \(k\) is locally integrable. As a consequence, the flow \(\boldsymbol X(t,\cdot)\) is uniformly continuous outside a set of arbitrarily small measure, with an explicit modulus of continuity determined by the integrability properties of \(D\boldsymbol b\). The resulting moduli include Hölder and log-Lipschitz regimes, as well as substantially weaker Osgood moduli. Our approach is based on a new family of weighted maximal operators associated with slowly varying functions in the sense of Karamata. We also provide examples showing that the resulting estimates are sharp in several respects and that the classical Lipschitz-type estimate may fail at the endpoint \(p=1\). Finally, we apply the flow estimates to transport equations, obtaining weighted logarithmic Sobolev regularity for transported scalars and corresponding lower bounds on functional and geometric mixing scales in the \(W^{1,1}\) setting.