Equivalence of types and Catlin boundary systems

Abstract

The D'Angelo finite type is shown to be equivalent to the Kohn finite ideal type on smooth, pseudoconvex domains in complex n space. This is known as the Kohn Conjecture. The argument uses Catlin's notion of a boundary system as well as methods from subanalytic and semialgebraic geometry. When a subset of the boundary contains only two level sets of the Catlin multitype, a lower bound for the subelliptic gain in the \bar\partial-Neumann problem is obtained in terms of the D'Angelo type, the dimension of the ambient space, and the level of forms.