Optimal lifting of Levi-degenerate hypersurfaces and applications to the Cauchy--Szegö projection

Abstract: We consider a family of Levi-degenerate finite type hypersurfaces in $\mathbb C^2$, where in general there is no group structure. We lift these domains to stratified Lie groups via a constructive proof, which optimizes the well-known lifting procedure to free Lie groups of general manifolds defined by Rothschild and Stein. This yields an explicit version of the Taylor expansion with respect to the horizontal vector fields induced by the sub-Riemannian structure on these hypersurfaces. Hence, as an application, we establish the Schatten class estimates for the commutator of the Cauchy--Szeg\"{o} projection with respect to a suitable quasi-metric defined on the hypersurface.