Study of some fundamental projective quadrics associated with a standard pseudo-Hermitian space \(H_{p,q}\) (Q451092)

This short note is a survey of some properties of projective quadrics associated to a pseudo-Hermitian form. The space \({\mathbb C}^{p+q}\), equiped with the pseudo-Hermitian form \[ \sum _{i=1}^p |x^i|^2-\sum _{i=p+1}^{p+q} |x^i|^2 \] is denoted by \(H_{p,q}\). The projective quadric \(\widetilde{Q(p,q)}\) is the image of the isotropic cone \(H\) in the real projective space \(P({\mathbb R}^{2n})\) (\(n=p+q\)), and \(\widetilde{H_{p,q}}\) in the complex projective space \(P({\mathbb C}^n)\). The quadric \(\widetilde{Q(p,q)}\), which is homeomorphic to \(S^{2p-1}\times S^{2q-1}/{\mathbb Z}^2\), is not simply connected, while \(\widetilde{H_{p,q}}\), which is homeomorphic to \(S^{2p-1}\times S^{2q-1}/S^1\), is simply connected. For \(y\in H\setminus \{0\}\), the orthogonal subspace \(D_y=y^{\perp}\) is contained in the tangent space \(T_y\) to \(H\) at \(y\). Hence one obtains a distribution \(\tilde y\mapsto D_{\tilde y}\) on \(\widetilde{H_{p,q}}\), which defines a special conformal pseudo-unitary structure of type \((p-1,q-1)\). The quadric \(\widetilde{H_{p+1,q+1}}\) can be seen as a conformal compactification of the vector space \(H_{p,q}\times {\mathbb R}\) by adjunction of a projective cone at infinity.