On highly degenerate CR maps of spheres (Q6144591)

CR spheres are the most symmetric manifolds in CR geometry and the study of their CR mappings is important to understand more general CR mappings and they are interesting on their own. The CR automorphims of spheres \(S^{2n-1}\subset \mathbb C^{n}\) are well-known fractional linear mappings. CR mappings from \(S^{2n-1}\subset \mathbb C^{n}\) to \(S^{2m-1}\subset \mathbb C^{m}\) with \(m>n\) (modulo automorphisms in source and target sphere) are scarce and known to be rational. Interesting examples occur only if \(m\) is ``much'' larger than \(n\). In the paper under review the authors classify the smooth CR maps \(S^3\to S^{2N-1}\) of degeneracy \(N-3\), for \(N\ge 4\). The degeneracy of a CR mapping is an invariant that, roughly speaking, measures the codimension of the infinitesimal image of the mapping at a point. Each of these maps has an image that is contained in a 5-dimensional complex-linear space and is of degree at most two, or is equivalent to one of the four maps into the 5-dimensional sphere classified by Faran. As a byproduct the authors obtain new examples of rational maps of degree three which are (\(N-3\))-degenerate only along a proper real subvariety and are not equivalent to polynomial maps.