# Tangent lines and Lipschitz differentiability spaces

created by cavallett on 03 Mar 2015
modified on 15 Apr 2016

[BibTeX]

Accepted Paper

Inserted: 3 mar 2015
Last Updated: 15 apr 2016

Journal: Anal. Geom. Metr. Spaces
Year: 2015

Abstract:

We study the existence of tangent lines, i.e. subsets of the tangent space isometric to the real line, in tangent spaces of metric spaces. We first revisit the almost everywhere metric differentiability of Lipschitz continuous curves. We then show that any blow-up done at a point of metric differentiability and of density one for the domain of the curve gives a tangent line.

Metric differentiability enjoys a Borel measurability property and this will permit us to use it in the framework of Lipschitz differentiability spaces. We show that any tangent space of a Lipschitz differentiability space contains at least $n$ distinct tangent lines, obtained as the blow-up of $n$ Lipschitz curves, where $n$ is the dimension of the local measurable chart. Under additional assumptions on the space, such as curvature lower bounds, these $n$ distinct tangent lines span an $n$-dimensional part of the tangent space.