Generalized Tanaka prolongation and convergence of formal equivalence between embeddings

The works of Commichau--Grauert and Hirschowitz showed that a formal equivalence between embeddings of a compact complex manifold is convergent, if the embeddings have sufficiently positive normal bundles in a suitable sense. We show that the convergence still holds under the weaker assumption of semi-positive normal bundles if some geometric conditions are satisfied. Our result can be applied to many examples of general minimal rational curves, including general lines on a smooth hypersurface of degree less than n in the (n+1) -dimensional projective space. As a key ingredient of our arguments, we formulate and prove a generalized version of Tanaka's prolongation procedure for geometric structures subordinate to vector distributions, a result of independent interest. When applied to the universal family of the deformations of the compact submanifolds satisfying our geometric conditions, the generalized Tanaka prolongation gives a natural absolute parallelism on a suitable fiber space. A formal equivalence of embeddings must preserve these absolute parallelisms, which implies its convergence.