Lipschitz and bi-Lipschitz maps from PI spaces to Carnot groups

Abstract: This paper deals with the problem of finding bi-Lipschitz behavior in non-degenerate Lipschitz maps between metric measure spaces. Specifically, we study maps from (subsets of) Ahlfors regular PI spaces into sub-Riemannian Carnot groups. We prove that such maps have many bi-Lipschitz tangents, verifying a conjecture of Semmes. As a stronger conclusion, one would like to know whether such maps decompose into countably many bi-Lipschitz pieces. We show that this is true when the Carnot group is Euclidean. For general Carnot targets, we show that the existence of a bi-Lipschitz decomposition is equivalent to a condition on the geometry of the image set.