Appears in collection : Spin geometry and analysis on manifolds / Géométrie spinorielle et analyse sur les variétés

On conformally compact manifolds of arbitrary signature I will describe a natural boundary calculus for computing the asymptotics of a class of natural boundary problems. This is applied to the non-linear problem of finding, conformally, a conformally compact constant scalar curvature metric on the interior of a manifold with boundary. This problem was studied from a different point of view by Andersson, Chrusciel, Friedrich (ACF) in 1992. They identified a conformal submanifold invariant that obstructs smooth boundary asymptotics for the problem on 3-manifolds (and gave some information on the obstructions in other dimensions). This invariant is the same as that arising from the variation of the Willmore energy. We find higher order submanifold invariants that generalise that curvature quantity found by ACF. This construction also leads to a route for manufacturing large classes of other conformal submanifold invariants.