Partial rigidity of degenerate CR embeddings into spheres (Q390760)

By the work of Webster, Faran and others it is known that local CR-embeddings of hyperspheres in \(\mathbb C^{n+1}\) into hyperspheres in \(\mathbb C^{N+1}\) are linear modulo automorphisms of the target sphere, provided \(N-n<n\). This has been generalised by Ebenfelt, Huang and Zaitsev to strictly pseudoconvex hypersurfaces \(M^n\) of low CR complexity \(\mu(M)=N_0-n\) where \(N_0\) is the minimal dimension such that \(M\) can be CR-embedded into an \(N_0\)-sphere. For higher dimensions of the target sphere more options for the embeddings occur, but there are gaps in the dimensions in which the embeddings are necessarily contained in lower dimensional linear subspaces. The main theorem in the paper under review gives an estimate for the dimensions of the subspaces in which the image of a smooth CR-mapping into a sphere is contained. These estimates are based on geometric characteristics that can be interpreted as ranks of the CR second fundamental form.