A primer on Carnot groups: homogenous groups, Carnot-Carathéodory spaces, and regularity of their isometries (Q1689545)

This paper gives a survey of key results about Carnot-Carathéodory spaces (also known as sub-Finsler manifolds). Roughly speaking, these are smooth manifolds in which one is only allowed to move along some subbundle of the tangent bundle. If one has a norm on this subbundle, one can use it to infinitesimally define distance on the manifold, giving it a metric space structure. The prototypes of such spaces are (sub-Finsler) Carnot groups. The paper begins by recalling the main definitions and basic facts about stratified, homogeneous and Carnot groups, including several useful examples and counterexamples. It is shown how Carnot groups arise as the tangent spaces of Carnot-Carathéodory spaces, and as the asymptotic cones of nilpotent Lie groups with sub-Finsler structure. The author sketches the proof of a result of Berestovskii, showing that any \(G\)-invariant intrinsic distance on a homogeneous Lie space \(G/H\) must be sub-Finsler. Further results give necessary and sufficient conditions for a metric space to be a sub-Finsler Carnot group. The last part of the paper discusses isometries of the metric structure of sub-Finsler Carnot groups and their open subsets, and of sub-Riemannian manifolds more generally. In particular, under what conditions are such isometries smooth with respect to the manifold structure, or even affine (a composition of group translation and dilation)? The author reviews a number of results in this direction. The paper has an extensive list of over 100 references for further reading.