Geodesics and shortest arcs of some sub-Riemannian metrics on the Lie groups $SU(2)\times\mathbb{R}$ and $SO(3)\times\mathbb{R}$ with three-dimensional generating distributions

Abstract

We find geodesics, shortest arcs, cut loci, first conjugate loci, distances between arbitrary elements for some left-invariant sub-Riemannian metrics on the Lie groups $SU(2)\times\mathbb{R}$ and $SO(3)\times\mathbb{R}$.