Contact projective structures and chains

DOI10.1007/S10711-009-9426-6zbMATH Open1204.53013arXiv0810.2721OpenAlexW2067701833WikidataQ57408572 ScholiaQ57408572MaRDI QIDQ976829FDOQ976829

Vojtech Zadnik, Andreas Cap

Publication date: 16 June 2010

Published in: Geometriae Dedicata (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Contact projective structures have been profoundly studied by D.J.F. Fox. He associated to a contact projective structure a canonical projective structure on the same manifold. We interpret Fox' construction in terms of the equivalent parabolic (Cartan) geometries, showing that it is an analog of Fefferman's construction of a conformal structure associated to a CR structure. We show that, on the level of Cartan connections, this Fefferman--type construction is compatible with normality if and only if the initial structure has vanishing contact torsion. This leads to a geometric description of the paths that have to be added to the contact geodesics of a contact projective structure in order to obtain the subordinate projective structure. They are exactly the chains associated to the contact projective structure, which are analogs of the Chern-Moser chains in CR geometry. Finally, we analyze the consequences for the geometry of chains and prove that a chain-preserving contactomorphism must be a morphism of contact projective structures.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/0810.2721

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zbMATH Keywords

projective structurechainspath geometryparabolic geometryCartan connectionFefferman constructioncontact projective structure

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

General geometric structures on manifolds (almost complex, almost product structures, etc.) (53C15) Contact manifolds (general theory) (53D10) Projective connections (53B10) Other connections (53B15)

Cites Work

• Real hypersurfaces in complex manifolds
• Lie algebra cohomology and the generalized Borel-Weil theorem
• Parabolic geometries and canonical Cartan connections
• Tractor calculi for parabolic geometries
• Correspondence spaces and twistor spaces for parabolic geometries
• On distinguished curves in parabolic geometries
• Contact projective structures
• On the geometry of chains
• CR-tractors and the Fefferman space
• Tractor bundles for irreducible parabolic geometries

Cited In (4)

• Almost every path structure is not variational
• Contact structure on mixed links
• On the geometry of chains
• Twistor geometry of a pair of second order ODEs

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