English

Sub-Riemannian cubics in SU(2)

Differential Geometry 2018-05-17 v2

Abstract

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 su(2)\mathfrak{su}(2), focusing on the long term dynamics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.02930,
  title  = {Sub-Riemannian cubics in SU(2)},
  author = {Michael Swaddle and Lyle Noakes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.02930},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

14 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:11:56.551Z