Characteristic Laplacian in sub-Riemannian geometry

We study a Laplacian operator related to the characteristic cohomology of a smooth manifold endowed with a distribution. We prove that this Laplacian does not behave very well: it is not hypoelliptic in general and does not respect the bigrading on forms in a complex setting. We also discuss the consequences of these negative results for a conjecture of P. Griffiths, concerning the characteristic cohomology of period domains.