TY - THES T1 - Invariants, volumes and heat kernels in sub-Riemannian geometry Y1 - 2011 A1 - Davide Barilari KW - Sub-Riemannian geometry AB - 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])\\r\\nVery recently, it appeared in the eld of cognitive neuroscience to model the\\r\\nfunctional 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]). PB - SISSA UR - http://hdl.handle.net/1963/6124 U1 - 6005 U2 - Mathematics U3 - Functional Analysis and Applications U4 - -1 ER -