English

Alternative tangent and cotangent structures and their physical applications

Mathematical Physics 2026-01-26 v1 math.MP

Abstract

The conditions under which a given manifold MM may be given a tangent bundle or a cotangent bundle structure are analyzed. This is an important property arising in different contexts. For instance, in the study of integrability of a given dynamics the existence of alternative compatible structures is very relevant, as well as in the geometric approach to Classical Mechanics. On the other hand in the quantum-to-classical transition, a Weyl system plays an important role for it provides (within the so-called Weyl-Wigner formalism) a description of quantum mechanics on a (symplectic) phase-space MM. A Lagrangian subspace QMQ\subset M of the (linear) phase space determines thus a maximal set of pairwise commuting unitary operators, which is used to parametrize the quantum states. As the choice of this maximal Abelian set of observables is not unique, the different choices make the phase space to become diffeomorphic to different cotangent bundles TQT^*Q corresponding to different choices for the base manifold (and hence the fibers). These motivating ideas are used to study how to define alternative tangent and/or cotangent bundle structures on a phase space.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.20855,
  title  = {Alternative tangent and cotangent structures and their physical applications},
  author = {José F. Cariñena and Jesús Clemente-Gallardo and Giuseppe Marmo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.20855},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

23 pages, no figures. Manuscript to appear in the special issue of the journal Geometric Mechanics in honor of Miguel C. Mu\~noz-Lecanda

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:55:31.620Z