Renormalized characteristic forms of the Cheng-Yau metric and global CR invariants (Q2217532)

Given a bounded strictly pseudo-convex domain \(\Omega\) with defining function \(\rho\), the Cheng-Yau metric \(g\) is defined by the Kähler form \(\omega:=-i\,\partial\bar{\partial}\log\rho\) with curvature form \(\Psi_i^{\,\,\,j}\). \textit{D. Burns} and \textit{C. L. Epstein} [Acta Math., 164, 29--71 (1990; Zbl 0704.32005)] defined a re-normalized Levi-Civita connection \(\overline{\nabla}\) and a re-normalized curvature \(W\) which coincides with the \((1,1)\)-component of the curvature \(\Theta_i^{\,\,\,j}\) of \(\overline{\nabla}\). For an Ad-invariant polynomial \(\Phi\) on \(\mathfrak{gl}(n + 1, \mathbb{C})\), they showed that \(\Phi(W) = \Phi(\Theta)\) and they called it the re-normalized characteristic form, its integral converges to a biholomorphic invariant of \(\Omega\) if \(\Phi\) has degree \(n + 1\). Burns and Epstein proved that this number is determined by local geometric data of the boundary. More generally, if \(M\) is the boundary of a strictly pseudoconvex domain in a complex manifold of dimension \(n+1\), one can define the Cheng-Yau metric \(g\) in terms of a Fefferman defining function \(\rho\) (in \S 2 and \S 3 of the paper some material about CR geometry and the Cheng-Yau metric is summed up). Then, if \(\Theta\) defines the curvature form of the re-normalized connection defined via \(\rho\), one can expand \[c_{n+1}(\Theta)= c_{n+1}(\Psi)+\sum_{m=0}^n \omega^{n+1-m}\wedge \Phi_m(\Theta)\,, \] where \(\Phi_m\) is an invariant polynomial of degree \(m\). The main theorem states that the finite part \[\mathrm{fp}\int_{\rho > \epsilon} \omega^{n+1-m} \wedge \Phi(\Theta) \] is an integral over \(M\) of a linear combination of the complete contractions of polynomials in the Tanaka-Webster curvature, torsion and their covariant derivatives. It gives a \(CR\) invariant of the boundary \(M\).