Abstract:

We exhibit examples of compact three-dimensional CR manifolds of positive Webster class, Rossi spheres, for which the pseudo-hermitian mass is negative, and for which the infimum of the CR-Sobolev quotient is not attained. To our knowledge, this is the first geometric context on smooth closed manifolds where this phenomenon arises, in striking contrast to the Riemannian case. This is joint work with Andrea Malchiodi and Paul Yang.