Geodesic manifolds with a transitive subset of smooth biLipschitz maps (Q664247)

Summary: This paper is connected with the problem of describing path metric spaces that are homeomorphic to manifolds and bi-Lipschitz homogeneous, i.e., whose bi-Lipschitz homeomorphism group acts transitively. Our main result is the following. Let \(X = G/H\) be a homogeneous manifold of a Lie group \(G\) and let \(d\) be a geodesic distance on \(X\) inducing the same topology. Suppose that there exists a subgroup \(G_S\) of \(G\) that acts transitively on \(X\) such that each element \(g \in G_S\) induces a locally bi-Lipschitz homeomorphism of the metric space \((X,d)\). Then the metric is locally bi-Lipschitz equivalent to a sub-Riemannian metric. Any such metric is defined by a bracket generating \(G_S\)-invariant sub-bundle of the tangent bundle. The result is a consequence of a more general fact that requires a transitive family of uniformly bi-Lipschitz diffeomorphisms with a control on their differentials. It will be relevant that the group acting transitively on the space is a Lie group and so it is locally compact, since, in general, the whole group of bi-Lipschitz maps, unlike the isometry group, is not locally compact. Our method also gives an elementary proof of the following fact: given a Lipschitz sub-bundle of the tangent bundle of a Finsler manifold, both the class of piecewise differentiable curves tangent to the sub-bundle and the class of Lipschitz curves almost everywhere tangent to the sub-bundle give rise to the same Finsler-Carnot-Carathéodory metric, under the condition that the topologies induced by these distances coincide with the manifold topology.