Pauls rectifiable and purely Pauls unrectifiable smooth hypersurfaces (Q2201737)

This paper is related to the problem of finding a good notion of rectifiability in sub-Riemannian geometry. The authors study the question which kind of results can be expected for smooth hypersurfaces in Carnot groups. The main contribution in this paper is a consequence of the following result: There exists a \(C^\infty\)-hypersurface \(S\) without characteristic points that has uncountably many pairwise non-isomorphic tangent groups on every positive-measure subset. The example is found in a Carnot group of topological dimension \(8\), it has Hausdorff dimension \(12\) and so the authors use on it the Hausdorff measure \(\mathcal{H}^{12}\). As a consequence, they show that any Lipschitz map defined on a subset of a Carnot group of Hausdorff dimension \(12\), with values in \(S\), has negligible image with respect to the Hausdorff measure \(\mathcal{H}^{12}\). In particular, they deduce that \(S\) cannot be Lipschitz parametrizable by countably many maps each defined on some subset of some Carnot group of Hausdorff dimension \(12\). As main consequence, they have that a notion of rectifiability proposed by \textit{S. D. Pauls} [Indiana Univ. Math. J. 53, No. 1, 49--81 (2004; Zbl 1076.49025)] is not equivalent to one proposed by \textit{B. Franchi} et al. [J. Geom. Anal. 13, No. 3, 421--466 (2003; Zbl 1064.49033)], at least for arbitrary Carnot groups. In addition, the authors show that, given a subset \(U\) of a homogeneous subgroup of Hausdorff dimension 12 of a Carnot group, every bi-Lipschitz map \(f: U\rightarrow S\) satisfies \(\mathcal{H}^{12}(f(U)) = 0\). Finally, the authors prove that such an example does not exist in Heisenberg groups: They prove that all \(C^\infty\)-hypersurfaces in \(\mathbb{H}^n\) with \(n \geq 2\) are countably \(\mathbb{H}^{n-1}\times\mathbb{R}\)-rectifiable according to Pauls' definition, even with bi-Lipschitz maps.