Unit tangent bundle

In Riemannian geometry, the unit tangent bundle of a Riemannian manifold (M, g), denoted by T1M, UT(M) or simply UTM, is the unit sphere bundle for the tangent bundle T(M). It is a fiber bundle over M whose fiber at each point is the unit sphere in the tangent bundle: where Tx(M) denotes the tangent space to M at x. Thus, elements of UT(M) are pairs (x, v), where x is some point of the manifold and v is some tangent direction (of unit length) to the manifold at x. The unit tangent bundle is equipped with a natural projection which takes each point of the bundle to its base point. The fiber π−1(x) over each point x ∈ M is an (n−1)-sphere Sn−1, where n is the dimension of M. The unit tangent bundle is therefore a sphere bundle over M with fiber Sn−1. The definition of unit sphere bundle can easily accommodate Finsler manifolds as well. Specifically, if M is a manifold equipped with a Finsler metric F : TM → R, then the unit sphere bundle is the subbundle of the tangent bundle whose fiber at x is the indicatrix of F: If M is an infinite-dimensional manifold (for example, a Banach, Fréchet or Hilbert manifold), then UT(M) can still be thought of as the unit sphere bundle for the tangent bundle T(M), but the fiber π−1(x) over x is then the infinite-dimensional unit sphere in the tangent space. The unit tangent bundle carries a variety of differential geometric structures. The metric on M induces a contact structure on UTM. This is given in terms of a tautological one-form, defined at a point u of UTM (a unit tangent vector of M) by where is the pushforward along π of the vector v ∈ TuUTM. Geometrically, this contact structure can be regarded as the distribution of (2n−2)-planes which, at the unit vector u, is the pullback of the orthogonal complement of u in the tangent space of M. This is a contact structure, for the fiber of UTM is obviously an integral manifold (the vertical bundle is everywhere in the kernel of θ), and the remaining tangent directions are filled out by moving up the fiber of UTM.

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Finsler manifold

In mathematics, particularly differential geometry, a Finsler manifold is a differentiable manifold M where a (possibly asymmetric) Minkowski functional F(x, −) is provided on each tangent space TxM, that enables one to define the length of any smooth curve γ : [a, b] → M as Finsler manifolds are more general than Riemannian manifolds since the tangent norms need not be induced by inner products. Every Finsler manifold becomes an intrinsic quasimetric space when the distance between two points is defined as the infimum length of the curves that join them.

Tautological one-form

In mathematics, the tautological one-form is a special 1-form defined on the cotangent bundle of a manifold In physics, it is used to create a correspondence between the velocity of a point in a mechanical system and its momentum, thus providing a bridge between Lagrangian mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics (on the manifold ). The exterior derivative of this form defines a symplectic form giving the structure of a symplectic manifold. The tautological one-form plays an important role in relating the formalism of Hamiltonian mechanics and Lagrangian mechanics.

Unit tangent bundle

Connections: motivation and definition MATH-512: Optimization on manifolds

Explores the definition of connections for smooth vector fields on manifolds.