English

Formal manifolds: foundations

Differential Geometry 2024-07-11 v3 Functional Analysis

Abstract

This is the first paper in a series that studies smooth relative Lie algebra homologies and cohomologies based on the theory of formal manifolds and formal Lie groups. In this paper, we lay the foundations for this study by introducing the notion of formal manifolds in the context of differential geometry, inspired by the notion of formal schemes in algebraic geometry. We develop the basic theory for formal manifolds, and establish a fully faithful contravariant functor from the category of formal manifolds to the category of topological C\mathbb{C}-algebras. We also prove the existence of finite products in the category of formal manifolds by studying vector-valued formal functions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.01535,
  title  = {Formal manifolds: foundations},
  author = {Fulin Chen and Binyong Sun and Chuyun Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.01535},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

First version of this paper was split into three separate papers. Vector-valued generalized functions and vector-valued distributions were separated into "Function spaces on Formal Manifolds" preprint, while de Rham complexes and Poincare's Lemma were separated into "Poincare's Lemma for formal manifolds"preprint. All the rest about the foundations of formal manifolds stayed in v3 of this preprint

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:07:30.734Z