Metric Lines in Engel-Type Groups

Abstract In the framework of sub-Riemannian manifolds, a natural question is: What are the “metric lines” (i.e., isometric embeddings of the real line)? This article presents a conjecture classifying metric lines in Carnot groups and investigates the question for Carnot groups of arbitrary rank. It focuses on metric lines in Engel-type groups, whose sub-Riemannian structure is defined on a distribution of rank $$n+1$$ . The approach employs a novel technique, the sequence method, initially developed to study metric lines in jet space.