Coarse differentiation and quantitative nonembeddability for Carnot groups

Abstract: We give lower bound estimates for the macroscopic scale of coarse differentiability of Lipschitz maps from a Carnot group with the Carnot-Carath\'{e}odory metric $(G,\dcc)$ to a few different classes of metric spaces. Using this result, we derive lower bound estimates for quantitative nonembeddability of Lipschitz embeddings of $G$ into a metric space $(X,d_X)$ if $X$ is either an Alexandrov space with nonpositive or nonnegative curvature, a superreflexive Banach space, or another Carnot group that does not admit a biLipschitz homomorphic embedding of $G$. For the same targets, we can further give lower bound estimates for the biLipschitz distortion of every embedding $f : B(n) \to X$, where B(n) is the ball of radius $n$ of a finitely generated nonabelian torsion-free nilpotent group $G$. We also prove an analogue of Bourgain's discretization theorem for Carnot groups and show that Carnot groups have nontrivial Markov convexity. These give the first examples of metric spaces that have nontrivial Markov convexity but cannot biLipschitzly embed into Banach spaces of nontrivial Markov convexity.