Flat Affine Manifolds And Their Transformations

We give a characterization of flat affine connections on manifolds by means of a natural affine representation of the universal covering of the Lie group of diffeomorphisms preserving the connection. From the infinitesimal point of view, this representation is determined by the 1-connection form and the fundamental form of the bundle of linear frames of the manifold. We show that the group of affine transformations of a real flat affine $n$-dimensional manifold, acts on $\mathbb{R}^n$ leaving an open orbit when its dimension is greater than $n$. Moreover, when the dimension of the group of affine transformations is $n$, this orbit has discrete isotropy. For any given Lie subgroup $H$ of affine transformations of the manifold, we show the existence of an associative envelope of the Lie algebra of $H$, relative to the connection. The case when $M$ is a Lie group and $H$ acts on $G$ by left translations is particularly interesting. We also exhibit some results about flat affine manifolds whose group of affine transformations admits a flat affine bi-invariant structure. The paper is illustrated with several examples.