Invariants, volumes and heat kernels in sub-Riemannian geometry

Sub-Riemannian geometry can be seen as a generalization of Riemannian geometry under non-holonomic constraints. From the theoretical point of view, sub-Riemannian geometry is the geometry underlying the theory of hypoelliptic operators (see [32, 57, 70, 92] and references therein) and many problems of geometric measure theory (see for instance [18, 79]). In applications it appears in the study of many mechanical problems (robotics, cars with trailers, etc.) and recently in modern elds of research such as mathematical models of human behaviour, quantum control or motion of self-propulsed micro-organism (see for instance [15, 29, 34]) Very recently, it appeared in the eld of cognitive neuroscience to model the functional architecture of the area V1 of the primary visual cortex, as proposed by Petitot in [87, 86], and then by Citti and Sarti in [51]. In this context, the sub-Riemannian heat equation has been used as basis to new applications in image reconstruction (see [35]).