Fractional Parabolic Partial Differential Equations in Anisotropic Spectral Barron Spaces: Regularity and Neural Approximation
We study fractional parabolic initial-value problems with lower-order drift and potential terms in anisotropic spectral Barron spaces, defined by weighted space--time Fourier $L^1$ norms adapted to parabolic scaling. We prove existence, uniqueness, and maximal regularity with a gain of one derivative in time and $γ$ derivatives in space, where $γ>0$ is the order of the fractional Laplacian. The evolution is defined only for $t\geq0$, whereas the finite-time norm requires a global extension with sufficient temporal Fourier decay. We construct a finite reflected semigroup extension using a Vandermonde system to match derivatives at $t=0$, obtaining temporal Fourier estimates uniform in the semigroup parameter. Combined with Fourier multiplier estimates for the damped principal operator, it yields maximal regularity. Dimension-independent multiplication estimates support a finite regularity bootstrap, while interpolation and sufficient damping absorb the lower-order terms in the base estimate. The a priori estimate and the method of continuity yield maximal regularity without smallness assumptions on the lower-order coefficients. A frequency-localized counterexample shows that a uniform-in-time spatial Barron bound on the forcing does not imply the corresponding two-derivative solution bound, even for the one-dimensional heat equation. Using this regularity, Fourier sampling yields $n^{-1/2}$ approximation rates for the solution in mixed space--time Sobolev norms using shallow networks with suitable activations. Sampling in a product Hilbert space yields a population-level PINN consistency estimate for shallow cosine networks on a bounded cylinder. There exists a single width-$n$ network for which the sum of the squared mixed-Sobolev solution error, the squared $L^2$-norm of the residual for the whole-space fractional equation, and the squared initial-data error is $O(n^{-1})$.