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The Bernstein problem for Lipschitz intrinsic graphs in the Heisenberg group

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Abstract

We prove that, in the first Heisenberg group \(\mathbb {H}\), an entire locally Lipschitz intrinsic graph admitting vanishing first variation of its sub-Riemannian area and non-negative second variation must be an intrinsic plane, i.e., a coset of a two dimensional subgroup of \(\mathbb {H}\). Moreover two examples are given for stressing result’s sharpness.

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Acknowledgements

This paper benefited from fruitful discussions with M. Ritoré: The authors want to thank him. The authors want to thank also the anonymous referee for the careful reading and suggestions.

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Correspondence to Sebastiano Nicolussi.

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Communicated by L. Ambrosio.

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Both authors have been supported by the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme, Marie Curie Actions-Initial Training Network, under grant Agreement No. 607643, “Metric Analysis For Emergent Technologies (MAnET)”.

S. N. has been supported by EPSRC Grant “Sub-Elliptic Harmonic Analysis” (EP/P002447/1), and by University of Padova STARS Project “Sub-Riemannian Geometry and Geometric Measure Theory Issues: Old and New”.

F. S. C. has been supported by MIUR, Italy, GNAMPA of INDAM and University of Trento.

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Nicolussi, S., Serra Cassano, F. The Bernstein problem for Lipschitz intrinsic graphs in the Heisenberg group. Calc. Var. 58, 141 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00526-019-1581-5

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