Explicit expression of Cartan’s connection for Levi-nondegenerate 3-manifolds in complex surfaces, and identification of the Heisenberg sphere

Abstract

Abstract We study effectively the Cartan geometry of Levi-nondegenerate C 6-smooth hypersurfaces M 3 in ℂ2. Notably, we present the so-called curvature function of a related Tanaka-type normal connection explicitly in terms of a graphing function for M, which is the initial, single available datum. Vanishing of this curvature function then characterizes explicitly the local biholomorphic equivalence of such M 3 ⊂ ℂ2 to the Heisenberg sphere ℍ3, such M’s being necessarily real analytic.