The Hessian of the distance from a surface in the Heisenberg group.
The Laplace-Beltrami operator in almost-Riemannian Geometry
We study the Laplace-Beltrami operator of generalized Riemannian structures on orientable surfaces for which a local orthonormal frame is given by a pair of vector fields that can become collinear.Under the assumption that the structure is 2-step Lie bracket generating, we prove that the Laplace-Beltrami operator is essentially self-adjoint and has discrete spectrum. As a consequence, a quantum particle cannot cross the singular set (i.e., the set where the vector fields become collinear) and the...
The structure of reachable sets for affine control systems induced by generalized Martinet sub-lorentzian metrics
In this paper we investigate analytic affine control systems q̇ = X + uY, u ∈ [a,b] , where X,Y is an orthonormal frame for a generalized Martinet sub-Lorentzian structure of order k of Hamiltonian type. We construct normal forms for such systems and, among other things, we study the connection between the presence of the singular trajectory starting at q0 on the boundary of the reachable set from q0 with the minimal number of analytic functions needed for describing the reachable set from q0.
Transport optimal de mesure dans le groupe de Heisenberg
Ultrarigid tangents of sub-Riemannian nilpotent groups
We show that the tangent cone at the identity is not a complete quasiconformal invariant for sub-Riemannian nilpotent groups. Namely, we show that there exists a nilpotent Lie group equipped with left invariant sub-Riemannian metric that is not locally quasiconformally equivalent to its tangent cone at the identity. In particular, such spaces are not locally bi-Lipschitz homeomorphic. The result is based on the study of Carnot groups that are rigid in the sense that their only quasiconformal maps...
Uniform Gaussian Bounds for Subelliptic Heat Kernels and an Application to the Total Variation Flow of Graphs over Carnot Groups
In this paper we study heat kernels associated with a Carnot group G, endowed with a family of collapsing left-invariant Riemannian metrics σε which converge in the Gromov- Hausdorff sense to a sub-Riemannian structure on G as ε→ 0. The main new contribution are Gaussian-type bounds on the heat kernel for the σε metrics which are stable as ε→0 and extend the previous time-independent estimates in [16]. As an application we study well posedness of the total variation flow of graph surfaces over a...
Variational calculus on sub-Riemannian manifolds.