Reduction of five-dimensional uniformly Levi degenerate CR structures to absolute parallelisms (Q363226)

Constructions of canonical Cartan connections for nondegenerate hypersurface-type CR-manifolds go back to Cartan, Tanaka and Chern. However attempts to generalise this for degenerate CR-manifolds have not been successful until now. The powerful machinery of parabolic geometry does not apply in this case. In the paper under review the authors construct an absolute parallelism for 5-dimensional CR-hypersurfaces whose Levi form has uniform rank 1. Though this absolute parallelism does not satisfy the invariance conditions of a Cartan connection it certainly solves the equivalence problem. While this is the first instance of reduction to absolute parallelism for Levi degenerate CR-structures concurrently \textit{C. Medori} and \textit{A. Spiro} have developed a Cartan connection in [``The equivalence problem for 5-dimensional Levi degenerate CR manifolds'', \url{http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.5638}].