On the Hartogs extension theorem for unbounded domains in ${\mathbb{C}}^n$

Abstract

Let $\Omega \subset {\mathbb{C}}^n$, $n\ge 2$, be a domain with smooth connected boundary. If $\Omega$ is relatively compact, the Hartogs-Bochner theorem ensures that every CR distribution on $\partial \Omega$ has a holomorphic extension to $\Omega$. For unbounded domains this extension property may fail, for example if $\Omega$ contains a complex hypersurface. The main result in this paper tells that the extension property holds if and only if the envelope of holomorphy of ${\mathbb{C}}^n\backslash \overline{\Omega }$ is ${\mathbb{C}}^n$. It seems that it is a first result in the literature which gives a geometric characterization of unbounded domains in ${\mathbb{C}}^n$ for which the Hartogs phenomenon holds. Comparing this to earlier work by the first two authors and Z.~Słodkowski, one observes that the extension problem sensitively depends on a finer geometry of the contact of a complex hypersurface and the boundary of the domain.

References in corpus (1)

• On defining functions for unbounded pseudoconvex domains