A note on sub-Riemannian structures associated with complex Hopf fibrations

Sub-Riemannian structures on odd-dimensional spheres respecting the Hopf fibration naturally appear in quantum mechanics. We study the curvature maps for such a sub-Riemannian structure and express them using the Riemannian curvature tensor of the Fubini-Study metric of the complex projective space and the curvature form of the Hopf fibration. We also estimate the number of conjugate points of a sub-Riemannian extremal in terms of the bounds of the sectional curvature and the curvature form. It presents a typical example for the study of curvature maps and comparison theorems for a general corank 1 sub-Riemannian structure with symmetries done by C. Li and I. Zelenko (2011) in [2]. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.