Sharp Regularity for the Integrability of Elliptic Structures

Abstract

As part of his celebrated Complex Frobenius Theorem, Nirenberg showed that given a smooth elliptic structure (on a smooth manifold), the manifold is locally diffeomorphic to an open subset of $\mathbb{R}^r\times \mathbb{C}^n$ (for some $r$ and $n$) in such a way that the structure is locally the span of $\frac{\partial}{\partial t_1},\ldots, \frac{\partial}{\partial t_r},\frac{\partial}{\partial \overline{z}_1},\ldots, \frac{\partial}{\partial \overline{z}_n}$; where $\mathbb{R}^r\times \mathbb{C}^n$ has coordinates $(t_1,\ldots, t_r, z_1,\ldots, z_n)$. In this paper, we give optimal regularity for the coordinate charts which achieve this realization. Namely, if the manifold has Zygmund regularity of order $s+2$ and the structure has Zygmund regularity of order $s+1$ (for some $s>0$), then the coordinate chart may be taken to have Zygmund regularity of order $s+2$. We do this by generalizing Malgrange's proof of the Newlander-Nirenberg Theorem to this setting.