A twistor transform and normal forms for Cauchy Riemann structures (Q6042645)

In [Acta Math. 172, No. 1, 1--49 (1994; Zbl 0814.32002)], the first author constructed a normal form for the deformation tensor of small deformations of the standard CR structure on the three sphere \(S^3\subset\mathbb C^2\). It turned out that the main obstructions toward their embeddability were the vanishing of two certain CR functions in the expansion of the deformation tensor in the spherical harmonics. Motivated by Henkin's suggestion on the mentioned results, the authors show that any CR structure \((S^3, \phi)\), which is sufficiently close to the standard one, is complex cobordant to the structure \((S^3, \phi_G)\), where \(\phi, \phi_G\) are two homomorphisms from the associated holomorphic bundle \(H_{(1,0)}\) to its anti-biholomorphic correspondence \(H_{(0,1)}\) and where, in particular, \(\phi_G\) is in normal form. Furthermore, by making explicit Hitchin's transform, they obtain normal coordinates in which the identifications \begin{center} non-embeddable CR structures \[ \updownarrow \] pseudo-concave surfaces with rational curves of self intersection one \[ \updownarrow \] projective structures \end{center} become explicit. As a consequence, the Kuranishi wiggles (a family of hypersurfaces in a given complex manifold) are captured by means of the Henkin-Epstein notion of complex cobordism. This results in showing that two equivalent CR structures, namely those which are isotopic to each other through the mentioned Kuranishi wiggles, have the same normal form. Even more, by virtue of the fact that the analysis of the space of pseudo-concave neighborhoods of an embedded \(\mathcal O(1)\) rational curve in a complex surface is closely related to the CR analysis on the boundary, normal coordinates for a neighborhood of such curves are constructed.