Symmetric spaces rolling on flat spaces (Q2679631)

In the first part of the paper the authors present two notions of rolling a Riemannian manifold over another: the intrinsec rolling and the extrinsic rolling. Let \(M\) and \(\hat{M}\) be two Riemannian or semi-Riemannian (pseudo-Riemannian) manifolds with the same dimension. In the case of an intrinsec rolling a curve \(\alpha (t)\) on \(M\) is said to roll on a curve \(\hat{\alpha }(t)\) on \(\hat{M}\) if there exists an oriented isometry \(A(t)\) from the tangent space \(T_{\alpha (t)}M\) onto the tangent space \(T_{\hat{\alpha }(t)}\hat{M}\) such that \[ \frac{d\hat{\alpha }}{dt}(t)=A(t)\frac{d\alpha }{dt}(t). \] In the case of an extrinsic rolling the manifold \(M\) and \(\hat{M}\) are isometrically embedded into a pseudo-Euclidean vector space \(V\). A curve \(g(t)\) of pseudo-Euclidean motions of \(V\) is said to roll a curve \(\alpha (t)\) on \(M\) onto a curve \(\hat{\alpha }(t)\) on \(\hat{M}\) if \(g(t)\) carries \(\alpha (t)\) onto \(\hat{\alpha }(t)\) together with the tangent spaces at \(\alpha (t)\) and \(\hat{\alpha }(t)\) and satisfies noslip and notwist conditions which are precisely stated. In a second part the authors study the rolling of a symmetric space on the tangent space at a base point. It is shown that the curve \(\alpha (t)\) together with the rolling conditions determines the curve \(\hat{\alpha }(t)\). In a third part several examples are studied: the rolling of the hyperbolic disc on the Euclidean plane, the rolling of a sphere on the Euclidean plane, the rolling of a pseudo-orthogonal group on its Lie algebra. Finally a non symmetric case is considered: the case of the Stiefel manifolds.