Playing off against each other the real and complex structures, we elucidate the local structure of certain representation spaces in the world of Poisson geometry. Particular cases of these spaces arise as moduli spaces of semistable holomorphic vector bundles on Riemann surfaces.
Some Poisson structures do admit resolutions by symplectic manifolds of the same dimension. We give examples and simple conditions under which such resolutions can not exist.
We give a normal form for families of 3-dimensional Poisson structures. This allows us to classify singularities with nonzero 1-jet and typical bifurcations. The Appendix contains corollaries on classification of families of integrable 1-forms on $R^3
Continuing a work of Ph.~Monnier, we determine the Gerstenhaber algebra structure over the Poisson cohomology groups for a large class of Poisson structures with isolated singularities over the plane. It reveals that there exists a GAGA type phenomenon. We give an explicit description via generators and relations for the case of simple singularities.
We use the techniques of integration of Poisson manifolds into symplectic Lie groupoids to build symplectic resolutions (= desingularizations) of the closure of a symplectic leaf. More generally, we show how Lie groupoids can be used to lift singularities, in particular when one imposes a compatibility condition with an additional structure given by a multi-vector field.
We establish a connection between smooth symplectic resolutions and symplectic deformations of a (possibly singular) affine Poisson variety. In particular, let V be a finite-dimensional complex symplectic vector space and G\subset Sp(V) a finite subgroup. Our main result says that the so-called Calogero-Moser deformation of the orbifold V/G is, in an appropriate sense, a versal Poisson deformation. That enables us to determine the algebra structure on the rational cohomology H^*(X) of any smooth symplectic resolution X \to V/G (multiplicative McKay correspondence). We prove further that if G i…
The Serre construction of rank two holomorphic bundles with a section is adapted to construct generalized holomorphic bundles on a generalized complex 4-manifold from the data of a set of points on an elliptic curve. The motivation is the special case of rank two Poisson modules on a complex surface with a holomorphic Poisson structure.
We prove that the information geometry's Frobenius manifold is a symplectic manifold having Poisson structures. By proving this statement, a bridge is created between the theories developed by Vinberg, Souriau and Koszul and the Frobenius manifold approach. Until now these approaches seemed disconnected.
The conditions for a cuspidal edge, swallowtail and other fundamental singularities are given in the context of Lie sphere geometry. We then use these conditions to study the Lie sphere transformations of a surface.
We review our study of Sasakian geometry as an agent for proving the existence of Einstein metrics on odd dimensional manifolds. Particular emphasis is given to the Sasakian structures occuring on links of isolated hypersurface singularities.
We present proofs of classical results in Poisson geometry using techniques from Dirac geometry. This article is based on mini-courses at the Poisson summer school in Geneva, June 2016, and at the workshop "Quantum Groups and Gravity" at the University of Waterloo, April 2016.
We call a singularity of a presymplectic form $ω$ removable in its graph if its graph extends to a smooth Dirac structure over the singularity. An example for this is the symplectic form of a magnetic monopole. A criterion for the removability of singularities is given in terms of regularizing functions for pure spinors. All removable singularities are poles in the sense that the norm of $ω$ is not locally bounded. The points at which removable singularities occur are the non-regular points of the Dirac structure for which we prove a general splitting theorem: Locally, every Dirac structure is…
We investigate Nijenhuis deformations of $L_\infty$-algebras, a notion that unifies several Nijenhuis deformations, namely those of Lie algebras, Lie algebroids, Poisson structures and Courant structures. Additional examples, linked to Lie $n$-algebras and $n$-plectic manifolds, are included.
It is known that the computation of the Poisson cohomology is closely related to the classification of singularities of Poisson structures. In this paper, we will first look for the normal forms of germs at (0,0) of Poisson structures on the real (or complex) plane and recall a result given by Arnold. Then, we will compute locally the Poisson cohomology of a particular type of Poisson structure.
Arnlind, Hoppe and Huisken showed how to express the Gauss and mean curvature of a surface embedded in a Riemannian manifold in terms of Poisson brackets of the embedding coordinates. We generalize these expressions to the pseudo-Riemannian setting and derive explicit formulas for the case of surfaces embedded in $\R^m$ with indefinite metric.
We previously extended the Marsden-Ratiu reduction theorem in Poisson geometry by means of graded geometry (see Part I of Arxiv:1009.0948) . In this note we provide the background material about graded geometry necessary for the proof. Further, we provide an alternative algebraic proof.
We discuss contravariant connections on Poisson manifolds. For vector bundles, the corresponding operational notion of a contravariant derivative had been introduced by Izu Vaisman. We show that these connections play an important role in the study of global properties of Poisson manifolds and we use them to define Poisson holonomy and new invariants of Poisson manifolds.
In this note we introduce the notion of a smooth structure on a conical pseudomanifold $M$ in terms of $C^\infty$-rings of smooth functions on $M$. For a finitely generated smooth structure $C^\infty (M)$ we introduce the notion of the Nash tangent bundle, the Zariski tangent bundle, the tangent bundle of $M$, and the notion of characteristic classes of $M$. We prove the vanishing of a Nash vector field at a singular point for a special class of Euclidean smooth structures on $M$. We introduce the notion of a conical symplectic form on $M$ and show that it is smooth with respect to a Euclidean…
This paper surveys some recent results on existence, uniqueness and removable singularities for fully nonlinear differential equations on manifolds. The discussion also treats restriction theorems and the strong Bellman principle.
These notes discuss various aspect of the ``representation theory'' of Poisson manifolds, with focus on Morita equivalence and Picard groups. We give a brief introduction to Poisson geometry (including Dirac and twisted Poisson structures) and algebraic Morita theory before presenting the geometric Morita theory of Poisson manifolds. We also point out the connections with the theory of symplectic groupoids and hamiltonian actions.
Every action on a Poisson manifold by Poisson diffeomorphisms lifts to a Hamiltonian action on its symplectic groupoid which has a canonically defined momentum map. We study various properties of this momentum map as well as its use in reduction.
The purpose of this paper is to establish an explicit correspondence between various geometric structures on a vector bundle with some well-known algebraic structures such as Gerstenhaber algebras and BV-algebras. Some applications are discussed. In particular, we found an explicit connection between the Koszul-Brylinski operator of a Poisson manifold and its modular class. As a consequence, we prove that Poisson homology is isomorphic to Poisson cohomology for unimodular Poisson structures.
Hans Duistermaat was scheduled to lecture in the 2010 School on Poisson Geometry at IMPA, but passed away suddenly. This is a record of a talk I gave at the 2010 Conference on Poisson Geometry (the week after the School) to share some of my memories of him and to give a brief assessment of his impact on the subject.
We study and completely describe pairs of compatible Poisson structures near singular points of the recursion operator satisfying natural non-degeneracy condition.
Given a manifold M with an action of a quadratic Lie algebra d, such that all stabilizer algebras are co-isotropic in d, we show that the product M\times d becomes a Courant algebroid over M. If the bilinear form on d is split, the choice of transverse Lagrangian subspaces g_1, g_2 of d defines a bivector field on M, which is Poisson if (d,g_1,g_2) is a Manin triple. In this way, we recover the Poisson structures of Lu-Yakimov, and in particular the Evens-Lu Poisson structures on the variety of Lagrangian Grassmannians and on the de Concini-Procesi compactifications. Various Poisson maps betwe…
Let $(M,g)$ be a surface with Riemannian metric and curved conic singularities. More precisely, a neighbourhood of a singularity is isometric to $(0,1)\times S^1$ with metric $g_{\text{conic}}=dr^2+f(r)^2dθ^2, r\in(0,1)$. We study the spectral geometry of $(M,g)$ using the heat trace expansion. We express the first few terms in the expansion through the geometry of the singularities. The constant term contains information about the angle at the tip of the cone. The next term, $bt^{1/2}$, is expressed through the curvature and the angle at the tip of the cone.
We study the integrability of Poisson and Dirac structures that arise from quotient constructions. From our results we deduce several classical results as well as new applications. We also give explicit constructions of Lie groupoids integrating two interesting families of geometric structures: (i) a special class of Poisson homogeneous spaces of symplectic groupoids integrating Poisson groups and (ii) Dirac homogeneous spaces.
We show that a Bott-Morse foliation in dimension 3 admits a linear, singular, Poisson structure of rank 2 with Bott-Morse singularities. We provide the Poisson bivectors for each type of singular component, and compute the symplectic forms of the characteristic distribution.
We briefly review our results on the Lie theory underlying vector bundles over Lie groupoids and Lie algebroids, pointing out the role of Poisson geometry in extending these results to double Lie algebroids and LA-groupoids.
We describe first integrals of geostrophic equations, which are similar to the enstrophy invariants of the Euler equation for an ideal incompressible fluid. We explain the geometry behind this similarity, give several equivalent definitions of the Poisson structure on the space of smooth densities on a symplectic manifold, and show how it can be obtained via the Hamiltonian reduction from a symplectic structure on the diffeomorphism group.
Let $(G,Π_{G},\tilde{g})$ be a Poisson-Lie group equipped with a left invariant pseudo-Riemannian metric $\tilde{g}$ and let $(TG,Π_{TG},\tilde{g}^{c})$ be the Sanchez de Alvarez tangent Poisson-Lie group of $G$ equipped with the left invariant pseudo-Riemannian metric $\tilde{g}^{c}$, complete lift of $\tilde{g}$. In this paper, we express respectively the Levi-Civita connection, curvature and metacurvature of $(TG,Π_{TG},\tilde{g}^{c})$ in terms of the Levi-Civita connection, curvature and metacurvature of the basis Poisson-Lie group $(G,Π_{G},\tilde{g})$ and we prove that the space of diffe…
We show that generalized broken fibrations in arbitrary dimensions admit rank-2 Poisson structures compatible with the fibration structure. After extending the notion of wrinkled fibration to dimension 6 we prove that these wrinkled fibrations also admit compatible rank-2 Poisson structures. In the cases with indefinite singularities we can provide these wrinkled fibrations in dimension 6 with near-symplectic structures.
In this paper, we study the Poisson equation and heat equation in a model matrix geometry $M_n$. Our main results are about the Poisson equation and global behavior of the heat equation on $M_n$. We can show that if $c_0$ is the initial positive definite matrix in $M_n$, then $c(t)$ exists for all time and is positive definite too. We can also show the entropy stability of the solutions to the heat equation.
We define a generalization of convex functions, which we call $δ$-convex functions, and show they must satisfy interior Hölder and $W^{1,p}$ estimates. As an application, we consider solutions of a certain class of fully nonlinear equations in conformal geometry with isolated singularities, in the case of non-negative Ricci curvature. We prove that such solutions either extend to a Hölder continuous function across the singularity, or else have the same singular behavior as the fundamental solution of the conformal Laplacian. We also obtain various removable singularity theorems for these equa…
We argue that some classical local geometries are of infinity origin, i.e. their smooth formal germs are (homotopy) representations of cofibrant (di)operads in spaces concentrated in degree zero. In particular, they admit natural infinity generalizations when one considers homotopy representations of that (di)operads in generic differential graded spaces. Poisson geometry provides us with a simplest manifestation of this phenomenon.
This paper is devoted to coregular submanifolds in Poisson geometry. We show that their local Poisson saturation is an embedded Poisson submanifold, and we give a normal form for this Poisson submanifold around the coregular submanifold. This result recovers the normal form around Poisson transversals, and it yields Poisson versions of some normal form/rigidity results around constant rank submanifolds in symplectic geometry. As an application, we prove a uniqueness result concerning coisotropic embeddings of Dirac manifolds in Poisson manifolds. We also show how our results generalize to the …
We describe some natural relations connecting contact geometry, classical Monge-Ampere equations and theory of singularities of solutions to nonlinear PDEs. They reveal the hidden meaning of Monge-Ampere equations and sheds new light on some aspects of contact geometry.
We introduce scattering-symplectic manifolds, manifolds with a type of minimally degenerate Poisson structure that is not too restrictive so as to have a large class of examples, yet restrictive enough for standard Poisson invariants to be computable. This paper will demonstrate the potential of the scattering symplectic setting. In particular, we construct scattering-symplectic spheres and scattering symplectic gluings between strong convex symplectic fillings of a contact manifold. By giving an explicit computation of the Poisson cohomology of a scattering symplectic manifold, we also introd…
We revisit our earlier work on the AKSZ formulation of topological sigma model on generalized complex manifolds, or Hitchin model. We show that the target space geometry geometry implied by the BV master equations is Poisson--quasi--Nijenhuis geometry recently introduced and studied by Stiénon and Xu (in the untwisted case). Poisson--quasi--Nijenhuis geometry is more general than generalized complex geometry and comprises it as a particular case. Next, we show how gauging and reduction can be implemented in the Hitchin model. We find that the geometry resulting form the BV master equation is c…
We consider surfaces embedded in a Riemannian manifold of arbitrary dimension and prove that many aspects of their differential geometry can be expressed in terms of a Poisson algebraic structure on the space of smooth functions of the surface. In particular, we find algebraic formulas for Weingarten's equations, the complex structure and the Gaussian curvature.
We prove that the Riemannian geometry of almost Kähler manifolds can be expressed in terms of the Poisson algebra of smooth functions on the manifold. Subsequently, Kähler-Poisson algebras are introduced, and it is shown that a corresponding purely algebraic theory of geometry and curvature can be developed. As an illustration of the new concepts we give an algebraic proof of the statement that a bound on the (algebraic) Ricci curvature induces a bound on the eigenvalues of the (algebraic) Laplace operator, in analogy with the well-known theorem in Riemannian geometry. As the correspondence be…
The concept of a symplectic structure first appeared in the works of Lagrange on the so-called "method of variation of the constants". These works are presented, together with those of Poisson, who first defined the composition law called today the "Poisson bracket". The method of variation of the constants is presented using today's mathematical concepts and notations.
For a generic embedding of a smooth closed surface $M$ into $\mathbb R^4$, the subset of $\mathbb R^4$ which is the affine $λ$-equidistant of $M$ appears as the discriminant set of a stable mapping $M \times M \to \mathbb R^4$, hence their stable singularities are $A_k, \, k=2, 3, 4,$ and $C_{2,2}^{\pm}$. In this paper, we characterize these stable singularities of $λ$-equidistants in terms of the bi-local extrinsic geometry of the surface, leading to a geometrical study of the set of weakly parallel points on $M$.
This thesis studies normal forms for Poisson structures around symplectic leaves using several techniques: geometric, formal and analytic ones. One of the main results (Theorem 2) is a normal form theorem in Poisson geometry, which is the Poisson-geometric version of the Local Reeb Stability (from foliation theory) and of the Slice Theorem (from equivariant geometry). The result generalizes Conn's theorem from fixed points to arbitrary symplectic leaves. We present two proofs of this result: a geometric one relying heavily on the theory of Lie algebroids and Lie groupoids (similar to the new p…
Let $M^{2n}$ be a Poisson manifold with Poisson bivector field $Π$. We say that $M$ is b-Poisson if the map $Π^n:M\toΛ^{2n}(TM)$ intersects the zero section transversally on a codimension one submanifold $Z\subset M$. This paper will be a systematic investigation of such Poisson manifolds. In particular, we will study in detail the structure of $(M,Π)$ in the neighbourhood of $Z$ and using symplectic techniques define topological invariants which determine the structure up to isomorphism. We also investigate a variant of de Rham theory for these manifolds and its connection with Poisson cohomo…
Using the idea of a generalized Kaehler structure, which is a pair of commuting generalized complex structures, we construct bihermitian metrics on the projective plane and the product of two projective lines, and show that any such structure on a compact 4-manifold M defines one on the moduli space of anti-self-dual connections on a fixed principal bundle over M. We highlight the role of holomorphic Poisson structures in all these constructions.
The theory of the last multipliers as solutions of the Liouville's transport equation, previously developed for vector fields, is extended here to general multivectors. Characterizations in terms of Witten and Marsden differentials are reobtained as well as the algebraic structure of the set of multivectors with a common last multiplier, namely Gerstenhaber algebra. Applications to Poisson bivectors are presented by obtaining that last multipliers count for ''how far away'' is a Poisson structure from being exact with respect to a given volume form. The notion of exact Poisson cohomology for a…
We present a computational toolkit for (local) Poisson-Nijenhuis calculus on manifolds. Our python module $\textsf{PoissonGeometry}$ implements our algorithms, and accompanies this paper. We include two examples of how our methods can be used, one for gauge transformations of Poisson bivectors in dimension 3, and a second one that determines parametric Poisson bivector fields in dimension 4.
We study Dirac structures associated with Manin pairs (\d,\g) and give a Dirac geometric approach to Hamiltonian spaces with D/G-valued moment maps, originally introduced by Alekseev and Kosmann-Schwarzbach in terms of quasi-Poisson structures. We explain how these two distinct frameworks are related to each other, proving that they lead to isomorphic categories of Hamiltonian spaces. We stress the connection between the viewpoint of Dirac geometry and equivariant differential forms. The paper discusses various examples, including q-Hamiltonian spaces and Poisson-Lie group actions, explaining …