In this paper, we focus on studying the Cauchy problem for semilinear damped wave equations involving the sub-Laplacian \(\mathcal {L}\) on the Heisenberg group \(\mathbb {H}^n\) with power type nonlinearity \(|u|^p\) and initial data taken from Sobolev spaces of negative order homogeneous Sobolev space \(\dot{H}^{-\gamma }_{\mathcal {L}}(\mathbb {H}^n), \gamma >0\) , on \(\mathbb {H}^n\) . In particular, in the framework of Sobolev spaces of negative order, we prove that the critical exponent is the exponent \(p_{\text {crit}}(Q, \gamma )=1+\frac{4}{Q+2\gamma },\) for \(\gamma \in (0, \frac{Q}{2})\) , where \(Q:=2n+2\) is the homogeneous dimension of \(\mathbb {H}^n\) . More precisely, we establish A global-in-time existence of small data Sobolev solutions of lower regularity for \(p>p_{\text {crit}}(Q, \gamma )\) in the energy evolution space;
A finite time blow-up of weak solutions for \(1<p<p_{\text {crit}}(Q, \gamma )\) under certain conditions on the initial data by using the test function method.
Furthermore, to precisely characterize the blow-up time, we derive sharp upper bound and lower bound estimates for the lifespan in the subcritical case.