We study various classes of real hypersurfaces that are not embeddable into more special hypersurfaces in higher dimension, such as spheres, real algebraic compact strongly pseudoconvex hypersurfaces or compact pseudoconvex hypersurfaces of finite type. We conclude by stating some open problems.
IntroductionThis paper is motivated by the following general problem:Given a real hypersurface M in a complex manifold X, when can it be (holomorphically) embedded into a more special real hypersurface M ′ in a complex manifold X ′ of possibly larger dimension? More specifically, which strongly pseudoconvex hypersurfaces can be embedded into a sphere?By a holomorphic map (resp. embedding) of M into M ′ , we mean a holomorphic map (resp. embedding) of an open neighborhood of M in X into X ′ , sending M into M ′ . In particular, it follows that a hypersurface holomorphically embeddable into a sphere S 2N −1 := { j |z j | 2 = 1} ⊂ C N is necessarily strongly pseudoconvex and real-analytic. However, not every strongly pseudoconvex real-analytic hypersurface can be even locally embedded into a sphere, as was independently shown by Forstneric [For1] and Faran [Fa]. These results, showing that such hypersurfaces in general position are not embeddable into spheres, were more recently further extended and strengthened by Forstneric [For2] showing that they also do not admit transversal holomorphic embeddings into a hyperquadric(By a transversal embedding F we mean one not sending the tangent space) Explicit examples of non-embeddable strongly pseudoconvex real-analytic hypersurfaces were given by the second author [Z2] along with explicit invariants serving as obstructions to embeddability. In Theorem 2.1 below we give an example of a compact strongly pseudoconvex realanalytic hypersurface in C 2 that does not admit any holomorphic embedding into a sphere (and more generally any transversal holomorphic embedding into a hyperquadric).