Alberti representations, rectifiability of metric spaces and higher integrability of measures satisfying a PDE

We give a sufficient condition for a Borel subset $E\subset X$ of a complete metric space with $\mathcal{H}^n(E)<\infty$ to be $n$-rectifiable. This condition involves a decomposition of $E$ into rectifiable curves known as an Alberti representation. Precisely, we show that if $\mathcal{H}^n|_E$ has $n$ independent Alberti representations, then $E$ is $n$-rectifiable. This is a sharp strengthening of prior results of Bate and Li. It has been known for some time that such a result answers many open questions concerning rectifiability in metric spaces, which we discuss. An important step of our proof is to establish the higher integrability of measures on Euclidean space satisfying a PDE constraint. These results provide a quantitative generalisation of recent work of De Philippis and Rindler and are of independent interest.