English

A note on Chern-Weil classes of Cartan connections

Differential Geometry 2026-05-07 v2

Abstract

We present a construction of Chern-Weil characteristic classes for pairs Cartan geometries sharing the same underlying data. Given any model Cartan geometry (Q,ω)(Q,\omega) with underlying data (G,V)(G,V) and a second Cartan geometry (P,θ)(P,\theta) with the same underlying data, we define a subalgebra of polynomials on the Atiyah algebroid of QQ together with a characteristic map that recovers the classical Chern-Weil map of a Cartan connection when (Q,ω)(Q,\omega) arises from a Klein pair modeling (P,θ)(P,\theta).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.00247,
  title  = {A note on Chern-Weil classes of Cartan connections},
  author = {Luca Accornero and Mateus M. de Melo and Ivan Struchiner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.00247},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Minor corrections made in this version