English

Sub-Riemannian geodesics on the 3-D sphere

Differential Geometry 2008-06-03 v2

Abstract

The unit sphere S3\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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0804.1695,
  title  = {Sub-Riemannian geodesics on the 3-D sphere},
  author = {Der-Chen Chang and Irina Markina and Alexander Vasil'ev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0804.1695},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

13 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:29:37.122Z