Blow-up estimates at horizontal points and applications

Horizontal points of smooth submanifolds in stratified groups play the role of singular points with respect to the Carnot-Carathe'odory distance. When we consider hypersurfaces, they coincide with the well known characteristic points. In two step groups, we obtain pointwise estimates for the Riemannian surface measure at all horizontal points of $C^{1,1}$ smooth submanifolds. As an application, we establish an integral formula to compute the spherical Hausdorff measure of any $C^{1,1}$ submanifold. Our technique also shows that $C^2$ smooth submanifolds everywhere admit an intrinsic blow-up and that the limit set is an intrinsically homogeneous algebraic variety.