Besicovitch covering property on graded groups and applications to measure differentiation (Q1741617)

The Besicovitch covering property is defined as follows: Let \((X, d)\) be a quasi-metric space. We say that \((X, d)\) satisfies the Besicovitch covering property (BCP), if there exists a constant \(N \ge 1\) such that the following holds: Let \(A\) be a bounded subset of \(X\) and \(\mathcal{B}\) be a family of balls such that each point of \(A\) is the center of some ball of \(\mathcal{B}\). Then there is a finite or countable subfamily \(F \subset \mathcal{B}\) such that the balls in \(F\) cover \(A\), and every point in \(X\) belongs to at most \(N\) balls in \(F\), that is, \(1_A \le \sum_{B \in F} l_B \le N\), where \(1_A\) denotes the characteristic function of the set \(A\). Here, also one of variants of BCP, which called the weak Besicovitch covering property, is introduced. These two variants are not equivalent in general metric spaces. The Besicovitch covering property originates from works of Besicovitch in connection with the theory of differentiation of measures in Euclidean spaces. In this article, graded Lie groups are considered. Homogeneous groups are those graded groups that can be equipped with homogeneous distances, i.e., homogeneous quasi-distances that satisfy the triangle inequality. The present article follows two previous papers of the authors. A complete answer to the question which homogeneous groups admit homogeneous distances, for which the BCP holds, is given. The main result is the following: Let \(G\) be a homogeneous group. There exist homogeneous distances on \(G\) for which the BCP holds if and only if \(G\) has commuting different layers. Also it is proved that for a sub-Riemannian Carnot group \((G, d)\) of step \(\ge 2\) the BCP does not hold on \((G, d)\). The connections with the theory of differentiation of measures is one of the main motivations of this article. It is proved that if \(M\) is a sub-Riemannian manifold and \(d\) is its sub-Riemannian distance, then there exists some locally finite Borel measure, for which the differentiation theorem on \((M, d)\) does not hold. Also a lot of corollaries and corresponding results are proved.