Closed symmetric 3-differentials on complex surfaces

Abstract

We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a non-degenerate symmetric 3-differential with nonzero Blaschke curvature on a complex surface to be locally representable as a product of three closed holomorphic 1-forms. We give two versions of this condition corresponding to different choices of coordinates, one of which defines a coordinate-free differential operator, answering a question of Bogomolov and de Oliveira.