A bi-Lipschitz characterization of strong minimum-attainment for Lipschitz maps

Abstract: We completely characterize the denseness of strongly minimum-attaining Lipschitz functions, a minimum analogue for strongly norm-attaining Lipschitz functions, in terms of bi-Lipschitz embeddings. More precisely, our main result shows that the set of strongly minimum-attaining Lipschitz functions defined on a complete metric space $M$ fails the denseness if and only if $M$ is bi-Lipschitz equivalent to a subset of $\mathbb{R}$ with positive Lebesgue measure, or equivalently, if $M$ admits a bi-Lipschitz embedding into $\mathbb{R}$ and $M$ has positive 1-dimensional Hausdorff measure. As a consequence, we provide an isometric characterization of the pure 1-unrectifiability of $M$ in terms of strongly minimum-attaining Lipschitz maps defined on bi-Lipschitz copies of closed subsets of $M$. Several counterexamples showing that the main result cannot be naturally extended to the vector-valued setting are also presented.