ar X iv : m at h / 04 02 33 2 v 2 [ m at h . D G ] 2 3 M ar 2 00 5 CONTACT PROJECTIVE STRUCTURES

A contact path geometry is a family of paths in a contact manifold each of which is everywhere tangent to the contact distribution and such that given a point and a one-dimensional subspace of the contact distribution at that point there is a unique path of the family passing through the given point and tangent to the given subspace. A contact projective structure is a contact path geometry the paths of which are among the geodesics of some affine connection. In the manner of T.Y. Thomas there is associated to each contact projective structure an ambient affine connection on a symplectic manifold with one-dimensional fibers over the contact manifold and using this the local equivalence problem for contact projective structures is solved by the construction of a canonical regular Cartan connection. This Cartan connection is normal if and only if an invariant contact torsion vanishes. Every contact projective structure determines canonical paths transverse to the contact structure which fill out the contact projective structure to give a full projective structure, and the vanishing of the contact torsion implies the contact projective ambient connection agrees with the Thomas ambient connection of the corresponding projective structure. An analogue of the classical Beltrami theorem is proved for pseudo-hermitian manifolds with transverse symmetry.