Higher Laplacians on pseudo-Hermitian symmetric spaces

One of the most fundamental operators studied in geometric analysis is the classical Laplace–Beltrami operator. On pseudo-Hermitian manifolds, higher Laplacians $L_m$ are defined for each positive integer m, where $L_1$ coincides with the Laplace–Beltrami operator. Despite their natural definition, these higher Laplacians have not yet been studied in detail. In this paper, we consider the setting of simple pseudo-Hermitian symmetric spaces, i.e., let $X=G/H$ be a symmetric space for a real simple Lie group G, equipped with a G-invariant complex structure. We show that the higher Laplacians $L_1,L_3,\dots ,L_{2r?1}$ form a set of algebraically independent generators for the algebra ${\mathbb{D}}_G(X)$ of G-invariant differential operators on X, where r denotes the rank of X. For higher rank, this is the first instance of a set of generators for ${\mathbb{D}}_G(X)$ defined explicitly in purely geometric terms, and confirms a conjecture of Engli? and Peetre, originally stated in 1996 for the class of Hermitian symmetric spaces.