Schwarzians on the Heisenberg group

Abstract: We study various notions of the Schwarzian derivative for contact mappings in the Heisenberg group $\mathbb{H}_1$ and introduce two definitions: (1) the CR Schwarzian derivative based on the conformal connection approach studied by Osgood and Stowe and, recently, by Son; (2) the classical type Schwarzian refering to the well-known complex analytic definition. In particular, we take into consideration the effect of conformal rigidity and the limitations it imposes. Moreover, we study the kernels of both Schwarzians and the cocycle conditions. Our auxiliary results include a characterization of the contact conformal vector fields. Inspired by ideas of Chuaqui--Duren--Osgood, Hern\'andez, Mart\'in and Venegas, we introduce the Preschwarzian for mappings in $\mathbb{H}_1$. Furthermore, we study results in the theory of subelliptic PDEs for the horizontal Jacobian and related differential expressions for harmonic mappings and the gradient harmonic mappings, the latter notion introduced here in the setting of $\mathbb{H}_1$.