Semi-isometric CR immersions of CR manifolds into K\"ahler manifolds and applications

Abstract

We study the second fundamental form of semi-isometric CR immersions from strictly pseudoconvex CR manifolds into K\"ahler manifolds. As an application, we give a precise condition for the CR umbilicality of real hypersurfaces, extending an well-known theorem by Webster on the nonexistence of CR umbilical points on generic real ellipsoids. As other applications, we extend the linearity theorem of Ji-Yuan for CR immersions into spheres with vanishing second fundamental form to the important case of three-dimensional manifolds, and prove the ``first gap'' theorem in the spirit of Webster, Faran, Cima-Suffridge, and Huang for semi-isometric CR immersions into a complex euclidean space of ``low'' codimension. Our new approach to the linearity theorem is based on the study of the first positive eigenvalue of the Kohn Laplacian.