Equivalence problem for Bishop surfaces

The paper has two parts. We first briefly survey recent studies on the equivalence problem for real submanifolds in a complex space under the action of biholomorphic transformations. We will mainly focus on some of the recent studies of Bishop surfaces, which, in particular, includes the work of the authors. In the second part of the paper, we apply the general theory developed by the authors to explicitly classify an algebraic family of Bishop surfaces with a vanishing Bishop invariant. More precisely, we let M be a real submanifold of ℂ² defined by an equation of the form w = zz̄ + 2Re(z^s + az^s+1) with s ≥ 3 and a a complex parameter. We will prove in the second part of the paper that for s ≥ 4 two such surfaces are holomorphically equivalent if and only if the parameter differs by a certain rotation. When s = 3, we show that surfaces of this type with two different real parameters are not holomorphically equivalent.