Local non-injectivity of the exponential map at critical points in sub-Riemannian geometry

Abstract: We prove that the sub-Riemannian exponential map is not injective in any neighbourhood of certain critical points. Namely that it does not behave like the injective map of reals given by $f(x) = x^3$ near its critical point $x = 0$. As a consequence, we characterise conjugate points in ideal sub-Riemannian manifolds in terms of the metric structure of the space. The proof uses the Hilbert invariant integral of the associated variational problem.