Sub-Riemannian geometry of parallelizable spheres (Q643335)

The authors consider sub-Riemannian structures for the parallelizable spheres \(S^3\) and \(S^7\). For \(S^3\), they describe a geometry which can be obtained either from the Lie group structure of \(SU(2)\) (i.e., the unit ball of the quaternions \(\mathbb H\)), from the complex structure of the open unit ball in \(\mathbb{C}^2\), or the structure of a principal \(S^1\)-bundle over \(S^3\) coming from the Hopf map. For \(S^7\), they describe two different geometries. One comes from the CR geometry and has step 2 and rank 6. The other comes from the quaternionic analogues of the Hopf map and has step 2 and rank 4.