Differentiability and approximate differentiability for intrinsic Lipschitz functions in Carnot groups and a Rademacher theorem (Q483947)

A \textit{Carnot group} \(\mathbb{G}\) is a connected, simply connected, nilpotent Lie group with stratified Lie algebra. Recall that a Lie algebra \(V\) is called \textit{stratified} iff there is a decomposition \(V= V_1 \oplus \dots \oplus V_n\) such that \([V_1, V_j]= V_{j+1}\) for \(1\leq j < n\) and \(V_n \not = \{0\}\). Carnot groups admit an intrinsic notion of distance, the Carnot-Carathéodory distance, which depends only on the algebraic structure of the Lie algebra of \(\mathbb{G}\). For non-abelian Carnot groups, the geometry defined by this distance is a subriemannian geometry. With respect to this geometry \textit{intrinsic Lipschitz graphs} and \textit{intrinsic differentiable} graphs are defined and their relationship is studied. These objects are natural analogues of the corresponding Euclidean notions. An important classical regularity result for Lipschitz functions on Euclidean spaces is Rademacher's theorem stating that a Lipschitz function \(f: \mathbb{R}^m \longrightarrow \mathbb{R}^n\) is differentiable almost everywhere. The authors use their characterization of Lipschitz graphs to derive a version of Rademacher's theorem for one codimensional intrinsically Lipschitz graphs in a class of Carnot groups, called \textit{Carnot groups of type *}.