Andrew James Bruce

Graded bundles in the category of Lie groupoids

We define and make initial study of Lie groupoids equipped with a compatible homogeneity (or graded bundle) structure, such objects we will refer to as weighted Lie groupoids. One can think of weighted Lie groupoids as graded manifolds in the category of Lie groupoids. This is a very rich geometrical theory with numerous natural examples. Note thatVB-groupoids, extensively studied in the recent literature, form just the particular case of weighted Lie groupoids of degree one. We examine the Lie theory related to weighted groupoids and weighted Lie algebroids, objects defined in a previous publication of the authors, which are graded manifolds in the category of Lie algebroids, showing that they are naturally related via differentiation and integration. In this work we also make an initial study of weighted Poisson{Lie groupoids and weighted Lie bi-algebroids, as well as weighted Courant algebroids.

Remarks on Contact and Jacobi Geometry

We present an approach to Jacobi and contact geometry that makes many facts, presented in the literature in an overcomplicated way, much more natural and clear. The key concepts are Kirillov manifolds and Kirillov algebroids, i.e. homogeneous Poisson manifolds and, respectively, homogeneous linear Poisson manifolds. The difference with the existing literature is that the homogeneity of the Poisson structure is related to a principal GL(1,R)-bundle structure on the manifold and not just to a vector field. This allows for working with Jacobi bundle structures on nontrivial line bundles and drastically simplifies the picture of Jacobi and contact geometry. In this sense, the properly understood concept of a Jacobi structure is a specialisation rather than a generalisation of a Poission structure. Our results easily reduce to various basic theorems of Jacobi and contact geometry when the principal bundle structure is trivial, as well as give new insight in the theory. For instance, we describe the structure of Lie groupoids with a compatible principal G-bundle structure and the ‘integrating objects’ for Kirillov algebroids, define canonical contact groupoids, and show that any contact groupoid has a canonical realisation as a contact subgroupoid of the latter.

On the concept of a filtered bundle

We present the notion of a filtered bundle as a generalisation of a graded bundle. In particular, we weaken the necessity of the transformation laws for local coordinates to exactly respect the weight of the coordinates by allowing more general polynomial transformation laws. The key examples of such bundles include affine bundles and various jet bundles, both of which play fundamental roles in geometric mechanics and classical field theory. We also present the notion of double filtered bundles which provide natural generalisations of double vector bundles and double affine bundles. Furthermore, we show that the linearisation of a filtered bundle - which can be seen as a partial polarisation of the admissible changes of local coordinates - is well defined.

Modular classes of Q-manifolds: a review and some applications

A Q-manifold is a supermanifold equipped with an odd vector field that squares to zero. The notion of the modular class of a Q-manifold -- which is viewed as the obstruction to the existence of a Q-invariant Berezin volume -- is not well know. We review the basic ideas and then apply this technology to various examples, including

On a geometric framework for Lagrangian supermechanics

L_{\infty}

Polarisation of Graded Bundles

-algebroids and higher Poisson manifolds.

Pre-Courant Algebroids

We re-examine classical mechanics with both commuting and anticommuting degrees of freedom. We do this by defining the phase dynamics of a general Lagrangian system as an implicit differential equation in the spirit of Tulczyjew. Rather than parametrising our basic degrees of freedom by a specified Grassmann algebra, we use arbitrary supermanifolds by following the categorical approach to supermanifolds.