Local gauge conditions for ellipticity in conformal geometry

Abstract

In this article we introduce local gauge conditions under which many curvature tensors appearing in conformal geometry, such as the Weyl, Cotton, Bach, and Fefferman-Graham obstruction tensors, become elliptic operators. The gauge conditions amount to fixing an $n$-harmonic coordinate system and normalizing the determinant of the metric. We also give corresponding elliptic regularity results and characterizations of local conformal flatness in low regularity settings.