English

General Notion of Curvature in Catastrophe Theory Terms

Mathematical Physics 2008-02-18 v1 math.MP

Abstract

We introduce a new notion of a curvature of a superconnection, different from the one obtained by a purely algebraic analogy with the curvature of a linear connection. The naturalness of this new notion of a curvature of a superconnection comes from the study of singularities of smooth sections of vector bundles (Catastrophe Theory). We demonstrate that the classical examples of obstructions to a local equivalence: exterior differential for 2-forms, Riemannian tensor, Weil tensor, curvature of a linear connection and Nijenhuis tensor can be treated in terms of one general approach. This approach, applied to the superconnection leads to a new notion of a curvature (proposed in this paper) of a superconnection.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0802.2187,
  title  = {General Notion of Curvature in Catastrophe Theory Terms},
  author = {Petko Nikolov and Lora Nikolova and Gergana Ruseva},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0802.2187},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

13 pages, Ninth International Conference on Geometry, Integrability and Quantization, 2007