On the energy of distributions, with application to the quaternionic Hopf fibrations (Q5954997)

Consider a compact oriented Riemannian manifold \(M\) and the Grassmann bundle \(G(q,M)\) of all oriented \(q\)-dimensional linear subspaces of \(T_xM\), \(x \in M\), equipped with the Sasaki metric. The authors introduce an energy functional for oriented \(q\)-dimensional distributions on \(M\) by considering the energy of the corresponding maps between the Riemannian manifolds \(M\) and \(G(q,M)\). Then they study the first and second variation of this energy functional and prove that the \(3\)-dimensional distribution on the sphere \(S^{4n+3}\) induced by the Hopf fibration onto quaternionic projective space \(HP^n\) is an unstable critical point for all \(n \geq 1\).