Elasticae in Killing submersions (Q350209)

Elastica (classical elastic curves) are some variational objects with applications in physics and engineering. They have been considered and studied by J. Bernoulli, L. Euler, J. Radon, R. Bryant, P. Griffiths, V. Jurdjevic, J. Langer, D.A. Singer and many others. An elastic curve(elastica) is a curve \(\alpha:[t_0,t_1]\to M\) immersed in a Riemannian manifold \(M\) which is critical for the bending energy \(\int_\alpha \kappa^2ds\), for variations with clamped ends, where \(\kappa\) and \(s\) denotes the curvature and arc length parameter of \(\alpha\). In the present paper, the authors study elastica in the total space of a Killing submersion. A Riemannian submersion \(\pi:E\to M\) of a three-dimensional Riemannian manifold \(E\) over a surface \(M\) is a Killing submersion if its fibres are the trajectories of a complete unit Killing vector field \(\xi\). Killing submersions are determined by two functions on \(M\), the Gaussian curvature and the so-called bundle curvature. After revising some generalities on Killing submersions and computing the Riemannian curvature tensor, the authors introduce the slant curves as curves whose osculating planes form a constant angle with the vertical foliation. It is shown that the slant curves family consists of either Lancret helices (curves making a constant angle with the vertical foliation) or curves whose torsion equals the bundle curvature. Such curves are characterized in terms of distinguished curves of Hopf cylinders. Next, the authors obtain the Euler-Lagrange equations for curvature-dependent energies and study elastica as a particular case. Next, several families of slant elastica, both with constant and non-constant curvature, in different total spaces of Killing submersions are constructed (mainly when the bundle curvature is constant). Slant elastica can be divided into two main families: curves with horizontal Frenet unit normal (Lancret helices) and curves with horizontal Frenet binormal. In the last section, the authors obtain a complete classification of the above classes of elastica in Bianchi-Cartan-Vranceanu spaces along with explicit parametrizations of all of them.