Related papers: The Geodesics of Rolling Ball Systems

The Special Euclidean group on the plane $SE(2)$ has the left-invariant sub-Riemannian structure. Every sub-Riemannian manifold possesses a Hamiltonian function governing the sub-Riemannian geodesic flow. Two natural questions are: What are…

In this article, we study geometric aspects of semi-arithmetic Riemann surfaces by means of number theory and hyperbolic geometry. First, we show the existence of infinitely many semi-arithmetic Riemann surfaces of various shapes and prove…

This paper is the first in a series where we attempt to give a complete description of the space of all embedded minimal surfaces of fixed genus in a fixed (but arbitrary) closed Riemannian 3-manifold. The key for understanding such…

We study the classical geodesic motions of nonzero rest mass test particles and photons in (3+1+n)- dimensional warped product spaces. An important feature of these spaces is that they allow a natural decoupling between the motions in the…

We study the geodesic flow corresponding to the left-invariant sub-Riemannian metric and the right-invariant distribution on the second Heisenberg group. The corresponding Hamiltonian system is completely integrable and in this paper we…

From a geometric viewpoint, billiard trajectories and geodesics are related by mutual approximation results. In one direction, it is known that every geodesic curve in the boundary of a smooth convex body can be approximated by a sequence…

This paper uncovers a large class of left-invariant sub-Rie\-mannian systems on Lie groups that admit explicit solutions with certain properties, and provides geometric origins for a class of important curves on Stiefel manifolds, called…

We establish a one-to-one correspondence between static spacetimes and Riemannian manifolds that maps causal geodesics to geodesics, as suggested by L. C. Epstein. We then explore constant curvature spacetimes - such as the de Sitter and…

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.

The objective of the current paper is essentially twofold. Firstly, to make clear the difference between two notions of rolling a Riemannian manifold over another, using a language accessible to a wider audience, in particular to readers…

After having investigated several types of geodesic ball packings in $\mathbf{S}^2 \times \mathbf{R}$ space, in this paper we study the locally optimal geodesic of simply and multiply transitive ball packings with equal balls to the space…

In many singular metric spaces, the regularity of a shortest-length curve is unknown. Algebraic varieties, or more generally sets defined by finitely many polynomial or real analytic equalities or inequalities, all locally partition into…

This paper is the third in a series dedicated to the fundamentals of sub-Riemannian geometry and its implications in Lie groups theory: "Sub-Riemannian geometry and Lie groups. Part I", math.MG/0210189, available at…

We construct a countable collection of one-parameter families of non-rotational minimal annuli with free boundary in geodesic balls of hyperbolic 3-space. Every surface within a given family shares a common prismatic symmetry group, and…

To any metric spaces there is an associated metric profile. The rectifiability of the metric profile gives a good notion of curvature of a sub-Riemannian space. We shall say that a curvature class is the rectifiability class of the metric…

Following a recent paper by Baryshnikov and Zharnitskii, we consider outer billiards in the plane possessing invariant curves consisting of periodic orbits. We prove the existence and abundance of such tables using tools from sub-Riemannian…

We begin by characterizing metabelian distributions in terms of principal bundle structures. Then, we prove that in sub-Riemannian manifolds with metabelian distributions of rank $r$, the projection of strictly singular trajectories to some…

We show that a geodesic metric space is hyperbolic in the sense of Gromov if and only if intersections of balls have bounded eccentricity. In particular, $\R$-trees are characterized among geodesic metric spaces by the property that the…

We completely classify the bijections of the Thurston geometries that preserve geodesics as sets. For Riemannian manifolds that satisfy a certain technical condition, we prove that a totally geodesic subset is a submanifold. We also…

The notion of a parallelizable distribution has been introduced and investigated. A non-integrable parallelizable distribution carries a natural sub-Riemannian structure. The geometry of this structure has been studied from the bi-viewpoint…