Related papers: Nonminimality of spirals in sub-Riemannian manifol…

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…

A longstanding open question in sub-Riemannian geometry is the smoothness of (the arc-length parameterization of) length-minimizing curves. In [6], this question is negative answered, with an example of a $C^2$ but not $C^3$…

A longstanding open question in sub-Riemannian geometry is the following: are sub-Riemannian length minimizers smooth? We give a negative answer to this question, exhibiting an example of a $C^2$ but not $C^3$ length-minimizer of a…

We study minimal surfaces in generic sub-Riemannian manifolds with sub-Riemannian structures of co-rank one. These surfaces can be defined as the critical points of the so-called {\it horizontal} area functional associated to the canonical…

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…

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…

We give a short solution to one of the main open problems in subriemannian geometry. Namely, we prove that length minimizers do not have corner-type singularities. With this result we solve Problem II of Agrachev's list, and provide the…

In this article, we study abnormal curves in a family of sub-Riemannian manifolds of rank 2. We focus on abnormal curves whose lifts to the cotangent bundle annihilate, at an interior point of the domain, all Lie brackets of length up to…

In this paper we prove that a certain class of embedded unknotted curves in $\mathbb{R}^3$ evolving under curve shortening flow do not form singularities Type II before collapsing to a point. Our proof uses tools of the minimal surface…

We show by explicit estimates that the SubRiemannian distance in a Carnot group of step two is locally semiconcave away from the diagonal if and only if the group does not contain abnormal minimizing curves. Moreover, we prove that local…

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…

In this paper we prove the strong Sard conjecture for sub-Riemannian structures on 3-dimensional analytic manifolds. More precisely, given a totally nonholonomic analytic distribution of rank 2 on a 3-dimensional analytic manifold, we…

We prove existence of regions minimizing perimeter under a volume constraint in contact sub-Riemannian manifolds such that their quotient by the group of contact transformations preserving the sub-Riemannian metric is compact.

In the real-analytic setting, we show that all sub-Riemannian minimizers (parametrized by the arc-length) are real-analytic everywhere except an at most countable non-dense set. In particular, non-analyticity may occur only on a set of…

A general study of minimal surfaces of the Riemannian product of two spheres S^2xS^2 is tackled. We stablish a local correspondence between (non-complex) minimal surfaces of S^2xS^2 and certain pair of minimal surfaces of the sphere S^3.…

It is well-known that normal extremals in sub-Riemannian geometry are curves which locally minimize the energy functional. Most proofs of this fact do not make, however, an explicit use of relations between local optimality and the geometry…

It is well-known that the class of piecewise smooth curves together with a smooth Riemannian metric induces a metric space structure on a manifold. However, little is known about the minimal regularity needed to analyze curves and…

We give a sufficient condition to rule out complete Riemannian metrics with nonnegative scalar curvature on the interiors of handlebodies. In higher dimensions, we give examples of ends of manifolds with positive scalar curvature metrics.

We present new anomalies in two-dimensional ${\mathcal N} =(2, 2)$ superconformal theories. They obstruct the shortening conditions of chiral and twisted chiral multiplets at coincident points. This implies that marginal couplings cannot be…

On Sasakian manifolds with their naturally occurring sub-Riemannian structure, we consider parallel and mirror maps along geodesics of a taming Riemannian metric. We show that these transport maps have well-defined limits outside the…