Contact projective structures and chains (Q976829)

\textit{D. J. F. Fox} extensively studied in [Indiana Univ. Math. J. 54, No.~6, 1547--1598 (2005; Zbl 1093.53083)] contact projective structures and showed that any given contact projective structure can be canonically extended to a projective structure on the same manifold. In this paper, the authors give an interpretation of such a construction in terms of the canonical Cartan connections, hence showing that it is an analog of the Fefferman construction of a conformal structure associated with a CR structure. In addition, they also show that this Fefferman type construction gives not only the canonical projective structure, but also its canonical Cartan connection if and only if the initial contact projective structure has a vanishing contact torsion. To do this, they give a geometric description of the paths in directions that are transverse to the contact distribution, which have to be added to the given paths in contact directions for obtaining the canonical projective structure. These curves are the chains associated with the contact projective structure, and are the analogs of the Chern-Moser chains in CR geometry. Finally, they also prove that contactomorphisms which preserve chains are in fact morphisms of contact projective structures.