Bundle Prolongations and Connections

A synthetic introduction to the fundamental notions of differential geometry, including tangent, vertical and jet prolongations of fibered manifolds; the Frölicher-Nijenhuis bracket; connections of fibered manifolds and, in particular, linear connections of vector bundles and tangent bundles; the covariant differential of vector-valued forms as a generalisation of the standard covariant derivative.

Formality properties of finitely generated groups and Lie algebras

We explore the graded-formality and filtered-formality properties of finitely generated groups by studying the various Lie algebras over a field of characteristic 0 attached to such groups, including the Malcev Lie algebra, the associated graded Lie algebra, the holonomy Lie algebra, and the Chen Lie algebra. We explain how these notions behave with respect to split injections, coproducts, direct products, as well as field extensions, and how they are inherited by solvable and nilpotent quotients. A key tool in this analysis is the 1-minimal model of the group, and the way this model relates to the aforementioned Lie algebras. We illustrate our approach with examples drawn from a variety of group-theoretic and topological contexts, such as finitely generated torsion-free nilpotent groups, link groups, and fundamental groups of Seifert fibered manifolds.

Deformations of Poisson structures on fibered manifolds and adiabatic slow–fast systems

In the context of normal forms, we study a class of slow–fast Hamiltonian systems on general Poisson fiber bundles with symmetry. Our geometric approach is motivated by a link between the deformation theory for Poisson structures on fibered manifolds and the adiabatic perturbation theory. We present some normalization results which are based on the averaging theorem for horizontal 2-cocycles on Poisson fiber bundles.

Structural aspects of Hamilton–Jacobi theory

In our previous papers [J. F. Cariñena, X. Gràcia, G. Marmo, E. Martínez, M. C. Muñoz-Lecanda and N. Román-Roy, Geometric Hamilton–Jacobi theory, Int. J. Geom. Meth. Mod. Phys. 3 (2006) 1417–1458; Geometric Hamilton–Jacobi theory for nonholonomic dynamical systems, Int. J. Geom. Meth. Mod. Phys. 7 (2010) 431–454] we showed that the Hamilton–Jacobi problem can be regarded as a way to describe a given dynamics on a phase space manifold in terms of a family of dynamics on a lower-dimensional manifold. We also showed how constants of the motion help to solve the Hamilton–Jacobi equation. Here we want to delve into this interpretation by considering the most general case: a dynamical system on a manifold that is described in terms of a family of dynamics (slicing vector fields) on lower-dimensional manifolds. We identify the relevant geometric structures that lead from this decomposition of the dynamics to the classical Hamilton–Jacobi theory, by considering special cases like fibered manifolds and Hamiltonian dynamics, in the symplectic framework and the Poisson one. We also show how a set of functions on a tangent bundle can determine a second-order dynamics for which they are constants of the motion.