Left-invariant CR structures on 3-dimensional Lie groups

Abstract

The systematic study of CR manifolds originated in two pioneering 1932 papers of Élie Cartan. In the first, Cartan classifies all homogeneous CR 3-manifolds, the most well-known case of which is a one-parameter family of left-invariant CR structures on \(\mathrm {SU}_2= S^3\), deforming the standard ‘spherical’ structure. In this paper, mostly expository, we illustrate and clarify Cartan’s results and methods by providing detailed classification results in modern language for four 3-dimensional Lie groups. In particular, we find that \({\mathrm {SL}_2({\mathbb {R}})}\) admits two one-parameter families of left-invariant CR structures, called the elliptic and hyperbolic families, characterized by the incidence of the contact distribution with the null cone of the Killing metric. Low dimensional complex representations of \({\mathrm {SL}_2({\mathbb {R}})}\) provide CR embedding or immersions of these structures. The same methods apply to all other 3-dimensional Lie groups and are illustrated by descriptions of the left-invariant CR structures for \(\mathrm {SU}_2\), the Heisenberg group, and the Euclidean group.