Volume geodesic distortion and Ricci curvature for Hamiltonian dynamics (Q2421938)

By studying the variation of a smooth volume form along extremals of a variational problem with nonholonomic constraints and an action-like Lagrangian, the authors show how the volume geodesic derivative, together with curvature-like invariants of the dynamics, appear in the asymptotic expansion of the volume. They thus generalize the well-known expansion of the Riemannian volume in terms of Ricci curvature to a wide class of Hamiltonian flows, including all sub-Riemannian geodesic flows. Let us mention that the volume geodesic derivative is an invariant introduced by the authors who study its basic properties in this paper.