A Bishop surface with a vanishing Bishop invariant (Q1030522)

In 1965 Errett A. Bishop (1928--1983) published a paper ``Differentiable manifolds in complex Euclidean space'' [Duke Math. J. 32, 1--21 (1965; Zbl 0154.08501)], where a generically embedded real surface in the complex space of dimension two was studied, and an invariant \(\lambda\) was introduced now called the Bishop invariant. In the present paper a solution to the equivalence problem for Bishop surfaces with the Bishop invariant \(\lambda=0\) is given. As a consequence, a problem that \textit{J. Moser} asked in [Ann. Acad. Sci. Fenn., Ser. A I, Math. 10, 397--410 (1985; Zbl 0585.32007)] is answered, in the negative. This is done in two major steps: first the formal normal form for such surfaces is derived, then it is shown that two real analytic Bishop surfaces with \(\lambda=0\) are holomorphically equivalent if and only if they have the same formal normal form (up to a trivial rotation). The convergence proof here is done through a new hyperbolic geometry associated with the surface. As an immediate consequence of the work in this paper, it is seen that the modular space of Bishop surfaces with the Bishop invariant vanishing and with the Moser invariant \(s<\infty\) is of infinite dimension. This phenomenon is strikingly different from the celebrated theory of \textit{J. K. Moser} and \textit{S. M. Webster} [Acta Math. 150, 255--296 (1983; Zbl 0519.32015)] for elliptic Bishop surfaces with non-vanishing Bishop invariants. Hence, Bishop surfaces with the Bishop invariant \(\lambda=0\) behave very differently from hyperbolic Bishop surfaces and elliptic Bishop surfaces with non-vanishing Bishop invariants.