A Necessary and Sufficient Condition for the Continuity of Local Minima of Parabolic Variational Integrals with Linear Growth

For proper minimizers of parabolic variational integrals with linear growth with respect to $|Du|$, we establish a necessary and sufficient condition for $u$ to be continuous at a point $(x_o,t_o)$, in terms of a sufficient fast decay of the total variation of $u$ about $(x_o,t_o)$ (see (1.4) below). These minimizers arise also as {proper} solutions to the parabolic $1$-laplacian equation. Hence, the continuity condition continues to hold for such solutions (\S\ 3).