Loose Engel structures

Abstract

This paper contributes to the study of Engel structures and their classification. The main result introduces the notion of a loose family of Engel structures and shows that two such families are Engel homotopic if and only if they are formally homotopic. This implies a complete $h$-principle when auxiliary data is fixed. As a corollary, we show that Lorentz and orientable Cartan prolongations are classified up to homotopy by their formal data.