An instability criterion for volume-preserving area-stationary surfaces with singular curves in sub-Riemannian 3-space forms (Q2204084)

The study of geometry and analysis on sub-Riemannian manifolds has been an active field over the past three decades. The authors study stable surfaces, i.e., second-order minima of the area for variations of fixed volume, in sub-Riemannian space forms of dimension 3. They prove a stability inequality and provide sufficient conditions ensuring instability of volume-preserving area-stationary \(C^2\) surfaces with a non-empty singular set of curves. Combined with previous results, this allows to describe any complete, orientable, embedded and stable \(C^2\) surface \(\sum\) in the Heisenberg group \(\mathbb{H}^1\) and the sub-Riemannian sphere \(\mathbb{S}^3\) of constant curvature 1. In \(\mathbb{H}^1\), the authors conclude that it is a Euclidean plane, a Pansu sphere or congruent to the hyperbolic paraboloid \(t = xy\). In \(\mathbb{S}^3\), the authors deduce that \(\sum\) is one of the Pansu spherical surfaces discovered in [the authors, Math. Ann. 340, No. 3, 675--708 (2008; Zbl 1132.53015)]. As a consequence, such spheres are the unique \(C^2\) solutions to the sub-Riemannian isoperimetric problem in \(\mathbb{S}^3\).