Complete stable CMC surfaces with empty singular set in Sasakian sub-Riemannian 3-manifolds (Q663328)

A contact sub-Riemannian manifold is a connected manifold \(M\) with a Riemannian metric \(g_h\) defined on an oriented contact distribution \(H\). A Sasakian sub-Riemannian three-dimensional manifold is a contact sub-Riemannian three-manifold such that the Reeb vector field \(T\) (transversal to \(H\)) is Killing in \((M,g)\), where \(g\) is a Riemannian metric on \(M\) whose restriction to \(H\) is \(g_h\). For constant mean curvature surfaces of class \(C^2\) immersed in a Sasakian sub-Riemannian three-manifolds, the author obtains a formula for the second derivative of the area which involves horizontal analytical terms, the Webster scalar curvature of the ambient manifold and the extrinsic shape of the surface. Area-stationary surfaces with non-negative second derivative of the area for compactly supported volume-preserving variations are called stable surfaces. The main result of the paper is a classification of complete surfaces with empty singular set which are stable. As a consequence, such a surface in the first Heisenberg group is a vertical plane. In the sub-Riemannian hyperbolic 3-space, the author characterizes the horocylinders as the unique ones with squared mean curvature 1. At the end, any complete surface with empty singular set in the sub-Riemannian 3-sphere is unstable. Carnot-Carathéodory (abbreviated CC)-geodesics and CC-Jacobi fields in Sasakian sub-Riemannian 3-manifolds play an important role in the proofs of the main results.