Obstruction flat rigidity of the CR 3-sphere

Abstract

Abstract We consider the obstruction flatness problem for small deformations of the standard CR 3-sphere. That rigidity holds for the CR sphere was previously known (in all dimensions) for the case of embeddable CR structures, where it also holds at the infinitesimal level. In the 3-dimensional case, however, a CR structure need not be embeddable. Unlike in the embeddable case, it turns out that in the nonembeddable case there is an infinite-dimensional space of solutions to the linearized obstruction flatness equation on the standard CR 3-sphere and this space defines a natural complement to the tangent space of the embeddable deformations. In spite of this, we show that the CR 3-sphere does not admit nontrivial obstruction flat deformations, embeddable or nonembeddable.