It is well-known that observability (and, by duality, controllability) of the elliptic wave equation, i.e., with a Riemannian Laplacian, in time $T_0$ is almost equivalent to the Geometric Control Condition (GCC), which stipulates that any geodesic ray meets the control set within time $T_0$. We show that in the subelliptic setting, GCC is never verified, and that subelliptic wave equations are never observable in finite time. More precisely, given any subelliptic Laplacian $Δ=-\sum_{i=1}^m X_i^*X_i$ on a manifold $M$, and any measurable subset $ω\subset M$ such that $M\backslash ω$ contains in its interior a point $q$ with $[X_i,X_j](q)\notin \text{Span}(X_1,\ldots,X_m)$ for some $1\leq i,j\leq m$, we show that for any $T_0>0$, the wave equation with subelliptic Laplacian $Δ$ is not observable on $ω$ in time $T_0$. The proof is based on the construction of sequences of solutions of the wave equation concentrating on geodesics (for the associated sub-Riemannian distance) spending a long time in $M\backslash ω$. As a counterpart, we prove a positive result of observability for the wave equation in the Heisenberg group, where the observation set is a well-chosen part of the phase space.

Analysis & PDE, Mathematical Sciences Publishers