Lipschitz regularity of sub-elliptic harmonic maps into CAT(0) space

Abstract

Abstract We prove the local Lipschitz continuity of sub-elliptic harmonic maps between certain singular spaces, more specifically from the 𝑛-dimensional Heisenberg group into CAT ⁡ ( 0 ) \operatorname{CAT}(0) spaces. Our main theorem establishes that these maps have the desired Lipschitz regularity, extending the Hölder regularity in this setting proven in [Y. Gui, J. Jost and X. Li-Jost, Subelliptic harmonic maps with values in metric spaces of nonpositive curvature, Commun. Math. Res. 38 (2022), 4, 516–534] and obtaining same regularity as in [H.-C. Zhang and X.-P. Zhu, Lipschitz continuity of harmonic maps between Alexandrov spaces, Invent. Math. 211 (2018), 3, 863–934] for certain sub-Riemannian geometries; see also [N. Gigli, On the regularity of harmonic maps from RCD ⁢ ( K , N ) \mathrm{RCD}(K,N) to CAT ⁢ ( 0 ) \mathrm{CAT}(0) spaces and related results, preprint (2022), https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.04317; and A. Mondino and D. Semola, Lipschitz continuity and Bochner–Eells–Sampson inequality for harmonic maps from RCD ⁡ ( k , n ) \operatorname{RCD}(k,n) spaces to CAT ⁡ ( 0 ) \operatorname{CAT}(0) spaces, preprint (2022), https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01590] for the generalisation to RCD spaces. The present result paves the way for a general regularity theory of sub-elliptic harmonic maps, providing a versatile approach applicable beyond the Heisenberg group.