Metric Rectifiability of ℍ-regular Surfaces with Hölder Continuous Horizontal Normal

Abstract

Abstract Two definitions for the rectifiability of hypersurfaces in Heisenberg groups $\mathbb{H}^n$ have been proposed: one based on ${\mathbb{H}}$-regular surfaces and the other on Lipschitz images of subsets of codimension-$1$ vertical subgroups. The equivalence between these notions remains an open problem. Recent partial results are due to Cole–Pauls, Bigolin–Vittone, and Antonelli–Le Donne. This paper makes progress in one direction: the metric Lipschitz rectifiability of ${\mathbb{H}}$-regular surfaces. We prove that ${\mathbb{H}}$-regular surfaces in $\mathbb{H}^{n}$ with $\alpha $-Hölder continuous horizontal normal, $\alpha> 0$, are metric bilipschitz rectifiable. This improves on the work by Antonelli–Le Donne, where the same conclusion was obtained for $C^{\infty }$-surfaces. In $\mathbb{H}^{1}$, we prove a slightly stronger result: every codimension-$1$ intrinsic Lipschitz graph with an $\epsilon $ of extra regularity in the vertical direction is metric bilipschitz rectifiable. All the proofs in the paper are based on a new general criterion for finding bilipschitz maps between “big pieces” of metric spaces.