LINES ON HOLOMORPHIC CONTACT MANIFOLDS AND A GENERALIZATION OF (2,3,5) -DISTRIBUTIONS TO HIGHER DIMENSIONS

Abstract

Since the celebrated work by Cartan, distributions with small growth vector (2,3,5) have been studied extensively. In the holomorphic setting, there is a natural correspondence between holomorphic (2,3,5) -distributions and nondegenerate lines on holomorphic contact manifolds of dimension 5. We generalize this correspondence to higher dimensions by studying nondegenerate lines on holomorphic contact manifolds and the corresponding class of distributions of small growth vector (2m, 3m, 3m+2) for any positive integer m.