Canonical Cartan connection and holomorphic invariants on Engel CR manifolds (Q996555)

It is well known that in dimension four, there is a special type of non-integrable distributions (subbundles of the tangent bundle) of rank two, which are called Engel distributions. They are characterized by the fact that sections of the distributions together with Lie brackets of two such sections span a rank three distribution, and together with triple brackets they span the whole tangent bundle. It is also well known that there is a local normal form for Engel distributions, so they do not have local invariants. This article is devoted to the study of Engel distributions which are endowed with a complex structure. Manifolds endowed with these objects can be viewed as (certain) CR manifolds of CR-dimension one and codimension two. The authors completely solve the equivalence problem for these Engel-CR-manifolds by constructing a natural principal fiber bundle with structure group \(\mathbb R^*\) and a canonical Cartan connection on this bundle. In particular, this shows that Engel-CR-structures do have local invariants. The authors identify four components of the curvature of the canonical Cartan connection as a complete set of CR invariants. Geometric interpretations of the vanishing of some of these components, as well as the relation between the Cartan curvature and the normal form for analytic embedded Engel-CR-manifolds constructed by the same authors are discussed.