Existence of Horizontal Immersions in Fat Distributions

Abstract

Contact structures, as well as their holomorphic and quaternionic counterparts are the primary examples of strongly bracket generating (or fat) distributions. In this article we associate a numerical invariant to corank $2$ fat distribution on manifolds, referred to as \emph{degree} of the distribution. The real distribution underlying a holomorphic contact structure is of degree $2$. Using Gromov's sheaf theoretic and analytic techniques of $h$-principle, we prove the existence of horizontal immersions of an arbitrary manifold into degree $2$ fat distributions and the quaternionic contact structures. We also study immersions of a contact manifold inducing the given contact structure.