Structure of porous sets in Carnot groups

Abstract

We show that any Carnot group contains a closed nowhere dense set which has measure zero but is not $\sigma $-porous with respect to the Carnot–Carathéodory (CC) distance. In the first Heisenberg group, we observe that there exist sets which are porous with respect to the CC distance but not the Euclidean distance and vice-versa. In Carnot groups, we then construct a Lipschitz function which is Pansu differentiable at no point of a given $\sigma $-porous set and show preimages of open sets under the horizontal gradient are far from being porous.