On CR Paneitz operators and CR pluriharmonic functions (Q2516885)

The CR Paneitz operator is a 4th-order CR invariant differential operator, which plays an important role in CR embedding problems and CR conformal geometry. It is particularly useful for three-dimensional CR manifolds because simpler and more traditional invariants vanish in this case. In the paper under review that author studies functional analytic properties of the CR Paneitz operator \(P\) on a three-dimensional, compact, orientable, embeddable, strongly pseudoconvex CR manifold \(X\). In particular he proves that \(P\) is self-adjoint and has \(L^2\) closed range. He establishes regularity properties for the partial inverse \(N\) and the projection \(\Pi\) onto ker P. The author shows that \(\Pi\), as well as two other \(L^2\) projections onto certain spaces of CR pluriharmonic functions are equal to the doubled real part of the Szegő projection up to some smoothing operators. Finally, the author proves that the spectrum of \(P\) is real and discrete and that, except for 0, the spectral values are eigenvalues with finite dimensional eigenspaces in \(\mathcal C^\infty(X)\).