The spheres of Sol

Abstract

Let Sol be the three-dimensional solvable Lie group equipped with its standard left-invariant Riemannian metric. We give a precise description of the cut locus of the identity, and a maximal domain in the Lie algebra on which the Riemannian exponential map is a diffeomorphism. As a consequence, we prove that the metric spheres in Sol are topological spheres, and we characterize their singular points almost exactly.