Tag: Lie groupoids

Lie groupoids and differential equations

In this blog post, I want to explain a way in which I like to motivate Lie groupoids via the theorem on the existence and uniqueness of solutions to ordinary differential equations. The basic idea is that in trying to do away with the choices – the initial time and the initial conditions – we’re naturally led to consider a ‘universal fundamental solution’. This is a matrix function depending on two parameters, the initial and final times, and it must satisfy a homomorphism-type condition. In order to axiomatize this condition, we are automatically led to the definition of a Lie groupoid. Once this has been absorbed, we can then rephrase the existence and uniqueness theorem as a correspondence between ODEs and representations of the pair groupoid of the real line. This is a special case of Lie’s second theorem for Lie groupoids.

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How does a Lie algebra encode a space? (Part 2)

In my last post, I told you how to encode the zero locus of a polynomial function f: V \to E in terms of an L_{\infty} -algebra structure on L = V[-1] \oplus E[-2] , where V lies in degree +1 and E lies in degree +2. Namely, we simply defined the n-ary bracket on L to be the n^{th} Taylor coefficient of f. This gave us one of the simplest examples of a derived manifold: the derived vanishing locus of f . It also illustrated a simple ‘principle’ of derived algebraic geometry: if the equations defining a space are not independent, then don’t impose them. Instead treat the equations as geometric spaces in their own right. This is useful in part because it allows us to avoid dealing directly with the space defined by the equations, which can often be quite pathological.

In this post, I want to discuss the other side of the story: quotients. What if we are trying to define a space by imposing an equivalence relation that fails to be independent in some way? Again the result can be quite pathological and the solution to this problem is, once again, to do nothing: just don’t take the quotient and treat the equivalence relation as a geometric space in its own right. This will lead us to Lie groupoids and then to stacks, which are Lie groupoids up to Morita equivalence. But what I’m really aiming towards is the infinitesimal counterpart to a Lie groupoid, which is called a Lie algebroid. After reviewing the definition I will explain that, by taking the Taylor coefficients of the structure maps, a Lie algebroid can locally be encoded by an L_{\infty} -algebra, this time concentrated in degrees 0 and +1 . This L_{\infty} -algebra, considered up to quasi-isomorphisms, encodes the formal quotient stack associated to the Lie algebroid. This post will be a little longer and a bit less concrete than the last one, but I still hope that it will help demystify both stacks and L_{\infty} -algebras.

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Deligne’s construction for extending connections.

In this post I will discuss a construction, due to Deligne, for extending a flat vector bundle to a flat logarithmic vector bundle. The setting of the construction is as follows: let  X be a smooth complex manifold, and let Y \subseteq X be a divisor (i.e. a codimension 1 subvariety). Then given a branch of the logarithm \tau (it is in fact sufficient to choose a ‘set theoretical’ logarithm) Deligne’s construction gives a canonical way of extending a flat holomorphic vector bundle on the complement of Y to a holomorphic vector bundle on X with a flat logarithmic connection having poles along Y:

Theorem. Let (F,\nabla) be a holomorphic vector bundle with flat connection on X \setminus Y. There exists a unique extension (G,\tilde{\nabla}) to all of X such that \tilde{\nabla} has logarithmic singularities along Y \subseteq X and the eigenvalues of the residue of \tilde{\nabla} lie in the image of \tau .

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