Variational aspects of the geodesics problem in sub-Riemannian geometry

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Abstract: We study the local geometry of the space of horizontal curves with endpoints freely varying in two given submanifolds mathcalP and mathcalQ of a manifold mathcalM endowed with a distribution mathcalDsubsetTM. We give a different proof, that holds in a more general context, of a result by Bismut (Large Deviations and the Malliavin Calculus, Birkhauser, 1984) stating that the normal extremizers that are not abnormal are critical points of the sub-Riemannian action functional. We use the Lagrangian multipliers method in a Hilbert manifold setting, which leads to a characterization of the abnormal extremizers (critical points of the endpoint map) as curves where the linear constraint fails to be regular. Finally, we describe a modification of a result by Liu and Sussmann that shows the global distance minimizing property of sufficiently small portions of normal extremizers between a point and a submanifold.




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