Higher Elastica: Geodesics in the Jet Space

Abstract

Carnot groups are subRiemannian manifolds. As such they admit geodesic flows, which are left-invariant Hamiltonian flows on their cotangent bundles. Some of these flows are integrable. Some are not. The space of k-jets for real-valued functions on the real line forms a Carnot group of dimension $k+2$. We show that its geodesic flow is integrable and that its geodesics generalize Euler's elastica, with the case $k=2$ corresponding to the elastica, as shown by Sachkov and Ardentov.