Fibers of monotone maps of finite distortion

Abstract

We study topologically monotone surjective $W^{1,n}$-maps of finite distortion $f \colon \Omega \to \Omega'$, where $\Omega, \Omega' $ are domains in $\mathbb{R}^n$, $n \geq 2$. If the outer distortion function $K_f \in L_{\mathrm{loc}}^{p}(\Omega)$ with $p \geq n-1$, then any such map $f$ is known to be homeomorphic, and hence the fibers $f^{-1}\{y\}$ are singletons. We show that as the exponent of integrability $p$ of the distortion function $K_f$ increases in the range $1/(n-1) \leq p < n-1$, then the fibers $f^{-1}\{y\}$ of $f$ start satisfying increasingly strong homological limitations. We also give a Sobolev realization of a topological example by Bing of a monotone $f \colon \mathbb{R}^3 \to \mathbb{R}^3$ with homologically nontrivial fibers, and show that this example has $K_f \in L^{1/2 - \varepsilon}_{\mathrm{loc}}(\mathbb{R}^3)$ for all $\varepsilon > 0$.