Semmes surfaces and intrinsic Lipschitz graphs in the Heisenberg group

Abstract

A Semmes surface in the Heisenberg group is a closed set $S$ that is upper Ahlfors-regular with codimension one and satisfies the following condition, referred to as Condition B. Every ball $B(x,r)$ with $x\in S$ and $0<r<\mathrm{diam}S$ contains two balls with radii comparable to $r$ which are contained in different connected components of the complement of $S$. Analogous sets in Euclidean spaces were introduced by Semmes in the late $80$'s. We prove that Semmes surfaces in the Heisenberg group are lower Ahlfors-regular with codimension one and have big pieces of intrinsic Lipschitz graphs. In particular, our result applies to the boundary of chord-arc domains and of reduced isoperimetric sets.

39 pages, 4 figures