Abstract
A CR manifold M, with CR distribution \(\mathcal {D}^{10} \subset T^\mathbb {C}M\), is called totally nondegenerate of depth \(\mu \) if: (a) the complex tangent space \(T^\mathbb {C}M\) is generated by all complex vector fields that might be determined by iterated Lie brackets between at most \(\mu \) fields in \(\mathcal {D}^{10} + \overline{\mathcal {D}^{10}}\); (b) for each integer \(2 \le k \le \mu -1\), the families of all vector fields that might be determined by iterated Lie brackets between at most k fields in \(\mathcal {D}^{10} + \overline{\mathcal {D}^{10}}\) generate regular complex distributions; (c) the ranks of the distributions in (b) have the maximal values that can be obtained amongst all CR manifolds of the same CR dimension and satisfying (a) and (b)—this maximality property is the total nondegeneracy condition. In this paper, we prove that, for any Tanaka symbol \(\mathfrak {m}= \mathfrak {m}^{-\mu } + \cdots + \mathfrak {m}^{-1}\) of a totally nondegenerate CR manifold of depth \(\mu \ge 4\), the full Tanaka prolongation of \(\mathfrak {m}\) has trivial subspaces of degree \(k \ge 1\), i.e. it has the form \(\mathfrak {m}^{-\mu } + \cdots + \mathfrak {m}^{-1} + \mathfrak {g}^0\). This result has various consequences. For instance it implies that any (local) CR automorphism of a regular totally nondegenerate CR manifold is uniquely determined by its first order jet at a fixed point of the manifold. It also gives a complete proof of a conjecture by Beloshapka on the group of automorphisms of homogeneous totally nondegenerate CR manifolds.
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Notes
By “locally homogeneous CR manifold” we mean that the Lie algebra \({{\,\mathrm{aut}\,}}(M, \mathcal {D}, J)\) of infinitesimal CR transformations generates local actions that are transitive on open sets of the manifold.
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Acknowledgements
The research of the first author was supported in part by the Grant from IPM, No. 96510425. The second author was partially supported by the Project MIUR “Real and Complex Manifolds: Geometry, Topology and Harmonic Analysis” and by GNSAGA of INdAM. After posting our paper on arXiv, we noticed that, independently and practically simultaneously to us, our main result has been proven also by Jan Gregorovič in [5]. The authors are grateful to Ilya Kossovskiǐ for pointing this preprint to us. We are also very grateful to Joël Merker and the referee for careful readings and truly helpful and constructive remarks.
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Sabzevari, M., Spiro, A. On the geometric order of totally nondegenerate CR manifolds. Math. Z. 296, 185–210 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00209-019-02415-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00209-019-02415-5