On the Energy of Distributions, with Application to the Quaternionic Hopf Fibrations

Abstract.

 The energy of an oriented q-distribution ? in a compact oriented manifold M is defined to be the energy of the section of the Grassmannian manifold of oriented q-planes in M induced by ?. In the Grassmannian, the Sasaki metric is considered. We show here a condition for a distribution to be a critical point of the energy functional. In the spheres, we see that Hopf fibrations are critical points. Later, we prove the instability for these fibrations.