We prove the local minimality of halfspaces in Carnot groups for a class of nonlocal functionals usually addressed as nonlocal perimeters. Moreover, in a class of Carnot groups in which the De Giorgi's rectifiability Theorem holds, we provide a lower bound for the $\Gamma$-liminf of the rescaled energy in terms of the horizontal perimeter.

We give a construction of direct limits in the category of complete metric scalable groups and provide sufficient conditions for the limit to be an infinite-dimensional Carnot group. We also prove a Rademacher-type theorem for such limits.

In the setting of Carnot groups, we exhibit examples of intrinisc Lipschitz curves of positive $\mathcal{H}^1$-measure that intersect every connected intrinsic Lipschitz curve in a $\mathcal{H}^1$-negligible set. As a consequence such curves cannot be extended to connected intrinsic Lipschitz curves. The examples are constructed in the Engel group and in the free Carnot group of step 3 and rank 2. While the failure of the Lipschitz extension property was already known for some pairs of Carnot groups, ours is the first example of the analogous phenomenon for intrinsic Lipschitz graphs. This is in sharp contrast with the Euclidean case.

In this paper we prove the existence of isoperimetric regions of any volume in Riemannian manifolds with Ricci bounded below and with a mild assumption at infinity, that is Gromov-Hausdorff asymptoticity to simply connected models of constant sectional curvature. The previous result is a consequence of a general structure theorem for perimeter-minimizing sequences of sets of fixed volume on noncollapsed Riemannian manifolds with a lower bound on the Ricci curvature. We show that, without assuming any further hypotheses on the asymptotic geometry, all the mass and the perimeter lost at infinity, if any, are recovered by at most countably many isoperimetric regions sitting in some Gromov-Hausdorff limits at infinity. The Gromov-Hausdorff asymptotic analysis conducted allows us to provide, in low dimensions, a result of nonexistence of isoperimetric regions in Cartan-Hadamard manifolds that are Gromov-Hausdorff asymptotic to the Euclidean space. While studying the isoperimetric problem in the smooth setting, the nonsmooth geometry naturally emerges, and thus our treatment combines techniques from both the theories.

The aim of this paper is to study ultralimits of pointed metric measure spaces (possibly unbounded and having infinite mass). We prove that ultralimits exist under mild assumptions and are consistent with the pointed measured Gromov-Hausdorff convergence. We also introduce a weaker variant of pointed measured Gromov-Hausdorff convergence, for which we can prove a version of Gromov's compactness theorem by using the ultralimit machinery. This compactness result shows that, a posteriori, our newly introduced notion of convergence is equivalent to the pointed measured Gromov one. Another byproduct of our ultralimit construction is the identification of direct and inverse limits in the category of pointed metric measure spaces.

These are lecture notes from various courses on sub-Riemannian geometry. The viewpoint that is emphasised is the one from the Lie group theory and metric geometry.