On the Hausdorff volume in sub-Riemannian geometry Andrei Agrachev SISSA, Trieste, Italy and MIAN, Moscow, Russia -
[email protected] Davide Barilari SISSA, Trieste, Italy -
[email protected] Ugo Boscain CNRS, CMAP Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France -
[email protected] October 29, 2018 Abstract For a regular sub-Riemannian manifold we study the Radon-Nikodym derivative of the spher- ical Hausdorff measure with respect to a smooth volume. We prove that this is the volume of the unit ball in the nilpotent approximation and it is always a continuous function. We then prove that up to dimension 4 it is smooth, while starting from dimension 5, in corank 1 case, it is 3 (and 4 on every smooth curve) but in general not 5. These results answer to a question addressedC byC Montgomery about the relation between twoC intrinsic volumes that can be defined in a sub-Riemannian manifold, namely the Popp and the Hausdorff volume. If the nilpotent approximation depends on the point (that may happen starting from dimension 5), then they are not proportional, in general. 1 Introduction In this paper, by a sub-Riemannian manifold we mean a triple S = (M, ∆, g), where M is a connected orientable smooth manifold of dimension n, ∆ is a smooth vector distribution of constant rank k<n, satisfying the H¨ormander condition and g is an Euclidean structure on ∆. A sub-Riemannian manifold has a natural structure of metric space, where the distance is the so called Carnot-Caratheodory distance T d(q0,q1) = inf gγ(t)(γ ˙ (t), γ˙ (t)) dt γ : [0, T ] M is a Lipschitz curve, { 0 | → arXiv:1005.0540v3 [math.DG] 15 Apr 2011 Z q γ(0) = q , γ(T )= q , γ˙ (t) ∆ a.e.