Flattening of CR singular points and analyticity of the local hull of holomorphy I

This is the first article of the two papers in which we investigate the holomorphic and formal flattening problem for a codimension two real submanifold in $${\mathbb C}^n$$ with $$n\ge 3$$ near a non-degenerate CR singular point. The problem is motivated from the study of the complex Plateau problem that seeks for the Levi-flat hypersurface bounded by a given real submanifold and is motivated by the classical complex analysis problem of finding the local hull of holomorphy of a real submanifold in a complex space. The present article is focused on the case of CR singular points with at least one elliptic direction. We solve the holomorphic flattening problem and thus provide a complete description of the local hull of holomorphy in this setting. The results in this paper and those in (Flattening of CR singular points and analyticity of the local hull of holomorphy II, p. 60, 2014) are taken from our arxiv post (Flattening of CR singular points and analyticity of the local hull of holomorphy, 2012). We split (Flattening of CR singular points and analyticity of the local hull of holomorphy, 2012) into two independent articles to avoid it being too long.