Homogeneous $2$-nondegenerate CR manifolds of hypersurface type in low dimensions

Abstract

In a recent paper, the author and I. Zelenko introduce the concept of modified CR symbols for organizing local invariants of $2$-nondegenerate CR structures. In this paper, we consider homogeneous hypersurfaces in $\mathbb{C}^4$, a natural frontier in the CR hypersurface Erlangen programs, and classify up to local equivalence the locally homogeneous $2$-nondegenerate hypersufaces in $\mathbb{C}^4$ whose symmetry group dimension is maximal among all such structures with the same local invariants encoded in their respective modified symbols. In the considered dimension, we show that among homogeneous structures with given modified CR symbols, the most symmetric structures (termed model structures) are unique. The classification is then achieved indirectly through classifying the modified symbols of homogeneous hypersurfaces in $\mathbb{C}^4$, obtaining (up to local equivalence) nine model structures. The methods used to obtain this classification are then applied to find homogeneous hypersurfaces in higher dimensional spaces. In total $20$ locally non-equivalent maximally symmetric homogeneous $2$-nondegenerate hypersurfaces are described in $\mathbb{C}^5$, and $40$ such hypersurfaces are described in $\mathbb{C}^6$, of which some have been described in other works while many are new. Lastly, two new sequences, indexed by $n$, of homogeneous $2$-nondegenerate hypersurfaces in $\mathbb{C}^{n+1}$ are described. Notably, all examples from one of these latter sequences can be realized as left-invariant structures on nilpotent Lie groups.