Curvature of sub-Riemannian spaces

Abstract

To any metric spaces there is an associated metric profile. The rectifiability of the metric profile gives a good notion of curvature of a sub-Riemannian space. We shall say that a curvature class is the rectifiability class of the metric profile. We classify then the curvatures by looking to homogeneous metric spaces. The classification problem is solved for contact 3 manifolds, where we rediscover a 3 dimensional family of homogeneous contact manifolds, with a distinguished 2 dimensional family of contact manifolds which don't have a natural group structure.