CR Paneitz operator on non-embeddable CR manifolds

Abstract

The CR Paneitz operator is closely related to some important problems in CR geometry. In this paper, we consider this operator on a non-embeddable CR manifold. This operator is essentially self-adjoint and its spectrum is discrete except zero. Moreover, the eigenspace corresponding to each non-zero eigenvalue is a finite dimensional subspace of the space of smooth functions. Furthermore, we show that the CR Paneitz operator on the Rossi sphere, an example of non-embeddable CR manifolds, has infinitely many negative eigenvalues, which is significantly different from the embeddable case.