Minimal surfaces in the Heisenberg group

We investigate the minimal surface problem in the three dimensional Heisenberg group, H, equipped with its standard Carnot-Caratheodory metric. Using a particular surface measure, we characterize minimal surfaces in terms of a sub-elliptic partial differential equation and prove an existence result for the Plateau problem in this setting. Further, we provide a link between our minimal surfaces and Riemannian constant mean curvature surfaces in H equipped with different Riemannian metrics approximating the Carnot-Caratheodory metric. We generate a large library of examples of minimal surfaces and use these to show that the solution to the Dirichlet problem need not be unique. Moreover, we show that the minimal surfaces we construct are in fact X-minimal surfaces in the sense of Garofalo and Nhieu.Comment: 26 pages, 12 figure

A notion of rectifiability modeled on Carnot groups

We introduce a notion of rectifiability modeled on Carnot groups. Precisely, we say that a subset E of a Carnot group M and N is a subgroup of M, we say E is N-rectifiable if it is the Lipschitz image of a positive measure subset of N. First, we discuss the implications of N-rectifiability, where N is a Carnot group (not merely a subgroup of a Carnot group), which include N-approximability and the existence of approximate tangent cones isometric to N almost everywhere in E. Second, we prove that, under a stronger condition concerning the existence of approximate tangent cones isomorphic to N almost everywhere in a set E, that E is N-rectifiable. Third, we investigate the rectifiability properties of level sets of C^1_N functions, where N is a Carnot group. We show that for almost every real number t and almost every noncharacteristic point x in a level set of f, there exists a subgroup T_x of H and r >0 so that f^{-1}(t) intersected with B_H(x,r) is T_x-approximable at x and an approximate tangent cone isomorphic to T_x at x.Comment: 27 page