How many geodesics join two points on a contact sub-Riemannian manifold? (Q2358620)

The paper presents a good contribution to the study of geodesics in sub-Riemannian geometry, which has a long history. The authors investigate local geodesics, that is, the geodesics under consideration join two points contained in a single coordinate chart of a sub-Riemannian manifold. It was previously known that every two points on a compact sub-Riemannian contact manifold \(M\) are joined by infinitely many geodesics. On the other hand, if \(M\) is a step-two Carnot group with a constant-rank distribution \(D \subset TM\), \(\text{rg} D > \tfrac{1}{2}\dim M\), the number of geodesics joining two generic points is finite. The main goal of this paper is to answer the question: how many geodesics join two points on a contact sub-Riemannian manifold? In answering this question, the authors present 46 theorems; some of them are formulated below. It is worth observing that most of the results hold true in more general situation, for corank-one sub-Riemannian manifolds. Let \(M=G\) be a contact Carnot group (or, more generally, a corank-one Carnot group) with exponential coordinates \((x,z) \in \mathbb{R}^{2n} \times \mathbb{R}\). Let \(\nu (p)\) denote the number of geodesics joining the origin with a generic point \(p=(x,z) \in G\). Then there are constants \(C_i > 0\), \(R_i\) such that the following estimations hold true: \[ C_1 \frac{|z|}{\|x\|^2} + R_1 \leq \nu(p) \leq C_2 \frac{|z|}{\|x\|^2} + R_2. \eqno(1) \] In particular, the authors establish conditions for \(\nu(p)=1\). The set of geodesics joining the origin with \(p \in G\), parametrized with their initial covector, is a topological space \(\Gamma(p)\), that naturally splits as the disjoint union \(\Gamma(p) = \Gamma_0(p) \cup \Gamma_{\infty}(p)\), where \(\Gamma_0(p)\) is a finite set of isolated geodesics, while \(\Gamma_{\infty}(p)\) contains continuous families of non-isolated geodesics. An estimate similar to (1) for the total Betti number of \(\Gamma(p)\) is established. When \(G\) is the Heisenberg group, families of geodesics appear if and only if \(p\) is a vertical nonzero point and each family is generated by the action of isometries on a given geodesic. Surprisingly, in more general cases, families of non-isometrically equivalent geodesics do appear. If the Carnot group \(G\) is the nilpotent approximation of a contact sub-Riemannian manifold \(M\) at a point \(p_0 \in M\), the authors prove that the number of geodesics in \(M\) joining \(p_0\) with another point \(p \in M\) can be estimated from below with \(\nu(p)\). As a corollary, they prove that the number of local geodesics between two points \(p,q \in M\) can be arbitrarily large. Namely, there exists a sequence \(q_n \in M\), \(q_n \to q\), such that the number of geodesics joining \(p\) and \(q_n\) tends to infinity as \(q_n \to q\).