Dimension distortion by Sobolev mappings in foliated metric spaces

Abstract: We quantify the extent to which a supercritical Sobolev mapping can increase the dimension of subsets of its domain, in the setting of metric measure spaces supporting a Poincar\'e inequality. For foliations of a metric space X defined by a David--Semmes regular mapping we quantitatively estimate, in terms of Hausdorff dimension, the size of the set of leaves of the foliation that are mapped onto sets of higher dimension. We discuss key examples of such foliations, including foliations of the Heisenberg group by left and right cosets of horizontal subgroups. Examples are given demonstrating the extent to which our results are sharp. In fact, we show that the set of mappings that distort the dimensions of sets by the maximum possible amount is a prevalent subset of the relevant function space; the latter result is new even in Euclidean space.