Liouville nonintegrability of sub-Riemannian problems on free Carnot groups of step 4

Abstract

One of the main approaches to the study of the Carnot–Carathéodory metrics is the Mitchell–Gromov nilpotent approximation theorem, which reduces the consideration of a neighborhood of a regular point to the study of the left-invariant sub-Riemannian problem on the corresponding Carnot group. A detailed analysis of sub-Riemannian extremals is usually based on the explicit integration of the Hamiltonian system of Pontryagin’s maximum principle. In this paper, the Liouville nonintegrability of this system for left-invariant sub-Riemannian problems on free Carnot groups of step 4 and higher is proved.