We use the notion of generalized connection over a bundle map in order to present an alternative approach to sub-Riemannian geometry. Known concepts, such as normal and abnormal extremals, will be studied in terms of this new formalism. In particular, some necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of abnormal extremals will be derived. We also treat the problem of characterizing those curves that verify both the nonholonomic equations and the so-called vakonomic equations for a `free' particle submitted to some kinematical constraints.
We give a short proof of the Morse index theorem for geodesics in semi-Riemannian manifolds by using K-theory. This makes the Morse index theorem reminiscent of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem for families of selfadjoint elliptic operators.
We prove the result stated in the title; it is equivalent to the existence of a regular point of the sub-Riemannian exponential mapping. We also prove that the metric is analytic on an open everywhere dense subset in the case of a complete real-analytic sub-Riemannian manifold.
We provide the first known family of examples of integrable homogeneous sub-Riemannian structures admitting strictly abnormal geodesics. These examples were obtained through the analysis of the equivalence problem for sub-Riemannian Engel structures. We formulate a criterion of strict abnormality in terms of structure functions of a canonical frame on a sub-Riemannian Engel manifold as well as estimates on conjugate times.
We prove the $C^{1}$ regularity for a class of abnormal length-minimizers in rank $2$ sub-Riemannian structures. As a consequence of our result, all length-minimizers for rank $2$ sub-Riemannian structures of step up to $4$ are of class $C^{1}$.
For an equiregular sub-Riemannian manifold M, Popp's volume is a smooth volume which is canonically associated with the sub-Riemannian structure, and it is a natural generalization of the Riemannian one. In this paper we prove a general formula for Popp's volume, written in terms of a frame adapted to the sub-Riemannian distribution. As a first application of this result, we prove an explicit formula for the canonical sub-Laplacian, namely the one associated with Popp's volume. Finally, we discuss sub-Riemannian isometries, and we prove that they preserve Popp's volume. We also show that, unde…
We compare different notions of curvature on contact sub-Riemannian manifolds. In particular we introduce canonical curvatures as the coefficients of the sub-Riemannian Jacobi equation. The main result is that all these coefficients are encoded in the asymptotic expansion of the horizontal derivatives of the sub-Riemannian distance. We explicitly compute their expressions in terms of the standard tensors of contact geometry. As an application of these results, we obtain a sub-Riemannian version of the Bonnet-Myers theorem that applies to any contact manifold.
We study the sub-Riemannian structure determined by a left-invariant distribution of rank 2 on a step 3 Carnot group of dimension 5. We prove the conjectured cut times of Y. Sachkov for the sub-Riemannian Cartan problem. Along the proof, we obtain a comparison with the known cut times in the sub-Riemannian Engel group, and a sufficient (generic) condition for the uniqueness of the length minimizer between two points. Hence we reduce the optimal synthesis to solving a certain system of equations in elliptic functions.
We study symmetries of specific left--invariant sub--Riemannian structure with filtration $(4,7)$ and their impact on sub--Riemannian geodesics of corresponding control problem. We show that there are two very different types of geodesics, they either do not intersect the fixed point set of symmetries or are contained in this set for all times. We use the symmetry reduction to study properties of geodesics.
The authors first in this paper define a semi-symmetric metric non-holonomic connection (called in briefly a semi-sub-Riemannian connection) on sub-Riemannian manifolds, and study the relations between sub-Riemannian connections and semi-sub-Riemannian connections. An invariant under a connection transformation $\nabla\rightarrow D$ is obtained. The authors then further deduce a sufficient and necessary condition that a sub-Riemannian manifold associated with a semi-sub-Riemannian connection is flat, and derive that a sub-Riemannian manifold with vanishing curvature with respect to semi-sub-Ri…
In the present paper we show that the geodesic flows of a sub-Riemannian metric and that of a Riemannian extension commute if and only if the extended metric is parallel with respect to a certain connection. This helps us to describe the geodesic flow of sub-Riemannian metrics on totally geodesic Riemannian submersions. As a consequence we can characterize sub-Riemannian geodesics as the horizontal lifts of projections of Riemannian geodesics.
The authors define a SNS (semi-nearly-sub)-Riemannian connection on nearly sub-Riemannian manifolds and study the geometric properties of such a connection, and obtain the natures of horizontal curvature tensors between horizontal sub-Riemannian connection and SNS-Riemannian connection. The authors further investigate the geometric characteristics of the projective SNS-Riemannian connection, and obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for a nearly sub-Riemannian manifold being projectively flat.
We use techniques from nonsmooth analysis and geometric measure theory to provide new examples of complete sub-Riemannian structures satisfying the Minimizing Sard conjecture. In particular, we show that complete sub-Riemannian structures associated with distributions of co-rank 2 or generic distributions of rank $\ge$ 2 satisfy the Minimizing Sard conjecture.
We compute the asymptotic expansion of the volume of small sub-Riemannian balls in a contact 3-dimensional manifold, and we express the first meaningful geometric coefficients in terms of geometric invariants of the sub-Riemannian structure
Sub-Riemannian cubics are a generalisation of Riemannian cubics to a sub-Riemannian manifold. Cubics are curves which minimise the integral of the norm squared of the covariant acceleration. Sub-Riemannian cubics are cubics which are restricted to move in a horizontal subspace of the tangent space. When the sub-Riemannian manifold is also a Lie group, sub-Riemannian cubics correspond to what we call a sub-Riemannian Lie quadratic in the Lie algebra. The present article studies sub-Riemannian Lie quadratics in the case of $\mathfrak{su}(2)$, focusing on the long term dynamics.
We study some sub-Riemannian objects (such as horizontal connectivity, horizontal connection, horizontal tangent plane, horizontal mean curvature) in hypersurfaces of sub-Riemannian manifolds. We prove that if a connected hypersurface in a contact manifold of dimension more than three is noncharacteristic or with isolated characteristic points, then given two points, there exists at least one piecewise smooth horizontal curve in this hypersurface connecting them. In any sub-Riemannian manifold, we obtain the sub-Riemannian version of the fundamental theorem of Riemannian geometry. We use this …
In this note we address a notion of sublaplacians of sub-Riemannian manifolds. In particular for fat sub-Riemannian manifolds we answered the sublaplacian question proposed by R. Montgomery.
In this paper, we derived biharmonic equations for pseudo-Riemannian submanifolds of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds which includes the biharmonic equations for submanifolds of Riemannian manifolds as a special case. As applications, we proved that a pseudo-umbilical biharmonic pseudo-Riemannian submanifold of a pseudo-Riemannian manifold has constant mean curvature, we completed the classifications of biharmonic pseudo-Riemannian hypersurfaces with at most two distinct principal curvatures, which were used to give four construction methods to produce proper biharmonic pseudo-Riemannian submanifol…
In those lecture notes, we review some applications of heat semigroups methods in Riemannian and sub-Riemannian geometry. The notes contain parts of courses taught at Purdue University, Institut Henri Poincaré, Levico Summer School and Tata Institute.
We give a generalized curvature-dimension inequality connecting the geometry of sub-Riemannian manifolds with the properties of its sub-Laplacian. This inequality is valid on a large class of sub-Riemannian manifolds obtained from Riemannian foliations. We give a geometric interpretation of the invariants involved in the inequality. Using this inequality, we obtain a lower bound for the eigenvalues of the sub-Laplacian. This inequality also lays the foundation for proving several powerful results in Part~II.
In this paper, we consider critical maps of a horizontal energy functional for maps from a sub-Riemannian manifold to a Riemannian manifold. These critical maps are referred to as subelliptic harmonic maps. In terms of the subelliptic harmonic map heat flow, we investigate the existence problem for subelliptic harmonic maps. Under the assumption that the target Riemannian manifold has non-positive sectional curvature, we prove some Eells-Sampson type existence results for this flow when the source manifold is either a step-2 sub-Riemannian manifold or a step-r sub-Riemannian manifold whose sub…
We prove sectional and Ricci-type comparison theorems for the existence of conjugate points along sub-Riemannian geodesics. In order to do that, we regard sub-Riemannian structures as a special kind of variational problems. In this setting, we identify a class of models, namely linear quadratic optimal control systems, that play the role of the constant curvature spaces. As an application, we prove a version of sub-Riemannian Bonnet-Myers theorem and we obtain some new results on conjugate points for three dimensional left-invariant sub-Riemannian structures.
The present paper is devoted to the problem of (local) geodesic equivalence of Riemannian metrics and sub-Riemannian metrics on generic corank 1 distributions. Using Pontryagin Maximum Principle, we treat Riemannian and sub-Riemannian cases in an unified way and obtain some algebraic necessary conditions for the geodesic equivalence of (sub-)Riemannian metrics. In this way first we obtain a new elementary proof of classical Levi-Civita's Theorem about the classification of all Riemannian geodesically equivalent metrics in a neighborhood of so-called regular (stable) point w.r.t. these metrics.…
We prove comparison theorems for the sub-Riemannian distortion coefficients appearing in interpolation inequalities. These results, which are equivalent to a sub-Laplacian comparison theorem for the sub-Riemannian distance, are obtained by introducing a suitable notion of sub-Riemannian Bakry-Émery curvature. The model spaces for comparison are variational problems coming from optimal control theory. As an application we establish the sharp measure contraction property for 3-Sasakian manifolds satisfying a suitable curvature bound.
B. Sahin [9] introduced the notion of anti-invariant Riemannian submersions from almost Hermitian manifolds onto Riemannian manifolds. In the present paper we extend the notion of anti-invariant and Lagrangian Riemannian submersions (a special anti-invariant Riemannian submersion) to the case of locally conformal Kaehler manifolds. We discuss the geometry of foliation and obtain some decomposition theorems for the total manifold of such submersions.
In this paper, we study harmonic Riemannian submersions from 3-dimensional geometries using the ( generalized) integrability data associated to an orthonormal frame natural to a Riemannian submersion. We give complete classifications of harmonic Riemannian submersions from Thurston's 3-dimensional geometries, 3-dimensional BCV spaces and Berger sphere into a surface. We also give some explicit constructions of these harmonic Riemannian submersions.
There are many equivalent definitions of Riemannian geodesics. They are naturally generalised to sub-Riemannian manifold, but become non-equivalent. We give a review of different definitions of geodesics of a sub-Riemannian manifold and interrelation between them. We recall three variational definitions of geodesics as (locally) shortest curves (Euler-Lagrange, Pontyagin and Hamilton) and three definitions of geodesics as straightest curves (d'Alembert , Levi-Civita-Schouten and Cartan-Tanaka ), used in nonholonomic mechanics and discuss their interrelations. We consider a big class of sub-Rie…
This paper is concerned with the study of the Monge optimal transport problem in sub-Riemannian manifolds where the cost is given by the square of the sub-Riemannian distance. Our aim is to extend previous results on existence and uniqueness of optimal transport maps to cases of sub-Riemannian structures which admit many singular minimizing geodesics. We treat here the case of sub-Riemannian structures of rank two in dimension four.
In this letter we exhibit the relation between the isometries of a Riemannian contraction of a sub-Riemannian manifold and those of the sub-Riemannian metric, for to use this relation with two goals: establishing a result about the existence of fixed points of isometries groups; and the other, defining a Multiresolution Analysis (MRA) on sub-Riemannian manifolds that it will permit to obtain Haar's bases on the manifolds before mentioned. Keywords: Sub-Riemannian geometry, minimizing geodesic, Haar functions, self-similarity.
In this paper, we study slant submanifolds of Riemannian manifolds with Golden structure. A Riemannian manifold $(\tilde{M},\tilde{g},φ)$ is called a Golden Riemannian manifold if the $(1,1)$ tensor field $φ$ on $\tilde{M}$ is a golden structure, that is $φ^{2}=φ+I$ and the metric $\tilde{g}$ is $φ-$ compatible. First, we get some new results for submanifolds of a Riemannian manifold with Golden structure. Later we characterize slant submanifolds of a Riemannian manifold with Golden structure and provide some non-trivial examples of slant submanifolds of Golden Riemannian manifolds.
In this paper we study geodesics of left-invariant sub-Riemannian metrics on SO(3) and almost-Riemannian metrics on $S^2$. These structures are connected with each other, and it is possible to use information about one of them to obtain results about another one. We give an explicit parameterization of sub-Riemannian geodesics on SO(3) and use it to get a parameterization of almost-Riemannian geodesics on $S^2$. We use symmetries of the exponential map to obtain some necessary optimality conditions. We present some upper bounds on the cut time in both cases and describe periodic geodesics on S…
Let $M$ be a surface with a Riemannian metric and $UM$ the unit tangent bundle over $M$ with the canonical contact sub-Riemannian structure $D$ on $UM$. In this paper, the complete local classification of singularities, under the Legendre fibration $UM$ over $M$, is given for sub-Riemannian geodesics of $(UM, D)$. Legendre singularities of sub-Riemannian geodesics are classified completely also for another Legendre fibration from $UM$ to the space of Riemannian geodesics on $M$. The duality on Legendre singularities is observed related to the pendulum motion.
We determine the lengths of all closed sub-Riemannian geodesics on the three-sphere. Our methods are elementary and allow us to avoid using explicit formulas for the sub-Riemannian geodesics.
Under a nondegeneracy condition, we show that an equiregular sub-Riemannian manifold of step size $r$ admits a canonical, $V$-rigid complement defined from the sub-Riemannian data that is preserved the by action of sub-Riemannian isometries. We explore how the existence of such a complement relates to results from the literature and study the step size 2 case in more detail.
Length spectra for Riemannian metrics are well studied, while sub-Riemannian length spectra have been largely unexplored. Here we give the length spectrum for a canonical sub-Riemannian structure attached to any compact Lie group by restricting its Killing form to the sum of the root spaces. Surprisingly, the shortest loops are the same in both the Riemannian and sub-Riemannian cases. We provide specific calculations for SU(2) and SU(3).
We study curvature invariants of a sub-Riemannian manifold (i.e., a manifold with a Riemannian metric on a non-holonomic distribution) related to mutual curvature of several pairwise orthogonal subspaces of the distribution, and prove geometrical inequalities for a sub-Riemannian submanifold. As applications, inequalities are proved for submanifolds with mutually orthogonal distributions that include scalar and mutual curvature. For compact submanifolds, inequalities are obtained that are supported by known integral formulas for almost-product manifolds.
We study isometries in the contact sub-pseudo-Riemannian geometry. In particular we give an upper bound on the dimension of the isometry group of a general sub-pseudo-Riemannian manifold and prove that the maximal dimension is attained for the left invariant structures on the Heisenberg group.
In this article we show how holomorphic Riemannian geometry can be used to relate certain submanifolds in one pseudo-Riemannian space to submanifolds with corresponding geometric properties in other spaces. In order to do so, we shall first rephrase and extend some background theory on holomorphic Riemannian manifolds, which is essential for the later application of the presented method.
Using the curvature-dimension inequality proved in Part~I, we look at consequences of this inequality in terms of the interaction between the sub-Riemannian geometry and the heat semigroup $P_t$ corresponding to the sub-Laplacian. We give bounds for the gradient, entropy, a Poincaré inequality and a Li-Yau type inequality. These results require that the gradient of $P_t f$ remains uniformly bounded whenever the gradient of $f$ is bounded and we give several sufficient conditions for this to hold.
We establish lower bounds for the first non-zero eigenvalue for the natural geometric sub-elliptic Laplacian operator defined on sub-Riemannian manifolds of step 2 that satisfy a positive curvature condition. The methods are very general and can be applied even when the sub-Riemannian geometry has considerable torsion.
We construct a canonically defined affine connection in sub-Riemannian contact geometry. Our method mimics that of the Levi-Civita connection in Riemannian geometry. We compare it with the Tanaka-Webster connection in the three-dimensional case.
We solve the local equivalence problem for sub-Riemannian structures on (2n + 1)-dimensional manifolds. We show that two sub-Riemannian structures are locally equivalent if and only if? their corresponding canonical linear connections are equivalent. When n = 1, these connections coincide with the generalized Tanaka-Webster connection of the corresponding contact metric structure. We show that in dimension > 5, there may not be any contact metric manifolds associated with a given sub-Riemannian structure.
The Metallic Ratio is fascinating topic that continually generated news ideas. A Riemannian manifold endowed with a Metallic structure will be called a Metallic Riemannian manifold. The main purpose of the present paper is to study the geometry of transversal lightlike submanifolds and radical transversal lightlike submanifolds and of Metallic Semi-Riemannian manifolds. We investigate the geometry of distributions and obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the induced connection on these manifolds to be metric connection. We also obtain characterization of transversal lightlike submani…
We prove that two-step analytic sub-Riemannian structures on a compact analytic manifold equipped with a smooth measure and Lipschitz Carnot groups satisfy measure contraction properties.
We provide some criteria to $p$-parabolicity of Riemannian submersions. In particular, if $N$ is $p$-parabolic and $π:M\to N$ is a Riemannian submersion with uniformly bounded volume of fibers, then $M$ is also $p$-parabolic. In the case of warped manifolds we characterize $p$-parabolicity in terms of a volume growth condition.
The unit sphere $\mathbb S^3$ can be identified with the unitary group SU(2). Under this identification the unit sphere can be considered as a non-commutative Lie group. The commutation relations for the vector fields of the corresponding Lie algebra define a 2-step sub-Riemannian manifold. We study sub-Riemannian geodesics on this sub-Riemannian manifold making use of the Hamiltonian formalism and solving the corresponding Hamiltonian system.
The authors found geodesics, shortest arcs, cut loci, and conjugate sets for left-invariant sub-Riemannian matric on the Lie group $SL(2)$, which is right-invariant relative to the Lie subgroup $SO(2)\subset SL(2)$ (in other words, for invariant sub-Riemannian metric on weakly symmetric space $(SL(2)\times SO(2))/SO(2)$).
We give some fundamental properties of the induced structures on submanifolds immersed in almost product or locally product Riemannian manifolds. We study the induced structure by the composition of two isometric immersions on submanifolds in an almost product Riemannian manifold. We give an effective construction for some induced structures on submanifolds of codimension 1 or 2 in Euclidean space.
Sub-Riemannian structures on odd-dimensional spheres respecting the Hopf fibration naturally appear in quantum mechanics. We study the curvature maps for such a sub-Riemannian structure and express them using the Riemannian curvature tensor of the Fubini-Study metric of the complex projective space and the curvature form of the Hopf fibration. We also estimate the number of conjugate points of a sub-Riemannian extremal in terms of the bounds of the sectional curvature and the curvature form. It presents a typical example for the study of curvature maps and comparison theorms for a general cora…
We prove global estimates for the sub-Riemannian distance of CR Sasakian manifolds with non negative horizontal Webster-Tanaka Ricci curvature. In particular, in this setting, large sub-Riemannian balls are comparable to Riemannian balls.
We prove that in a class of non-equiregular sub-Riemannian manifolds corners are not length minimizing. This extends the results [4]. As an application of our main result we complete and simplify the analysis in [6], showing that in a 4-dimensional sub-Riemannian structure suggested by Agrachev and Gauthier all length-minimizing curves are smooth.
We build an analogue for the Levi-Civita connection on Riemannian manifolds for sub-Riemannian manfiolds modeled on the Heisenberg group. We demonstrate some geometric properties of this connection to justify our choice and show that this connection is unique in having these properties.
In this paper we introduce paraquaternionic CR-submanifolds of almost paraquaternionic hermitian manifolds and state some basic results on their differential geometry. We also study a class of semi-Riemannian submersions from paraquaternionic CR-submanifolds of paraquaternionic Kaehler manifolds.
The Golden Ratio is fascinating topic that continually generated news ideas. A Riemannian manifold endowed with a Golden Structure will be called a Golden Riemannian manifold. The main purpose of the present paper is to study the geometry of radical transversal lightlike submanifolds and transversal lightlike submanifolds of Golden Semi-Riemannian manifolds. We investigate the geometry of distributions and obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the induced connection on these manifolds to be metric connection.
