CONNECTIONS AND COVARIANT DERIVATIVES ON VECTOR BUNDLES

VICTOR SANTOS

1. Fibre bundles Let B, E, F be smooth manifolds, together with a smooth surjective projection p : E B. We say that p has the local product property in u B with respect to F if there is an open set U B containing u and a smooth dieomorphism : p1 (U ) U F such that the diagram p1 (U )
p 1

U F

U commutes. The map 1 : U F U is the projection onto the rst factor: 1 (u, f ) = u, for any u U and f F . The set U is called a trivializing chart and a trivializing dieomorphism for U . The pair (U, ) is called a local trivializing representation. (E, p, B, F ) is called a bre bundle over B if p has the local product property with respect to F for any point u B. E is the total space, B the base space and F is the typical bre of the bundle. The set Eu = p1 (u) is called the bre over u and it is a closed smooth submanifold of E, dieomorphic to F for any u B. 2. Vector bundles A smooth bre bundle (E, p, B, E) is called a vector bundle is E and Eu = p1 (u) are real vector spaces for all u B, and if there is a covering collection of trivializing representations (U , ) such that each trivializing dieomorphism : p1 (U ) U E is brewise linear; that is, the map ,u : Eu E given by ,u = 2 |Eu is a linear isomorphism. A smooth map s : B E is called a smooth section of E i p s = idB . We denote the space of all smooth sections by (E). 3. Connections In a smooth vector bundle (E, p, M, E), the map p induces the tangent map T p(u) : Tu E Tp(u) M . The vertical bundle of E, denoted by VE, is the kernel of T p: VE = ker T p. A subdundle HE of the tangent bundle T E is called a horizontal bundle over E is the Whitney sum VE HE is strongly isomorphic to T E: T E = VE HE; then, if Hu E denotes the bre of the horizontal bundle over u E we have T p(u) : Hu E Tp(u) M . A connection on the vector bundle is a smooth choice of vertical vectors, given by the map : E VE, such that = and Im = VE. With this denition the horizontal bundle is simply given by HE = ker . Let N be a smooth manifold and f : N E. Then for any v Tq N , T ( f )(q)(v) V(f )(q) E, and since Vu E is canonically isomorphic to Ep(u) , T ( f )(q)(v) can be viewed as a vector in Ep(f (q)) , which we denote by v f : v f = T ( f )(q)(v).
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VICTOR SANTOS

This yields the smooth map f : T N E; in particular for any X (T M ) and any s (E) yield X s (E), dened by (X s)(u) = X(u) s Eu for all u M . The map :(T M ) (E) (E) (X, s) X s has the following properties: (1) X (s1 + s2 )(u) = T ( (s1 + s2 ))(u)(X) = T ( s1 + s2 )(u)(X) = T ( s1 )(u)(X) + T ( s2 )(u)(X) = X s1 (u) + X s2 (u) (2) X ( s) = T ( ( s))(u)(X) = T ( ( s))(u)(X) MISSING PROOF !! (3) X+Y s(u) = T ( s)(u)(X + Y ) = T ( s)(u)(X) + T ( s)(u)(Y ) = X s + Y s (4) X s(u) = T ( s)(u)( X) = T ( s)(u)(X) = X s This map is called a covariant derivative. A covariant derivative denes a curvature operator R : (T M ) (T M ) (E) (E) which assigns to each pair X, Y (T M ) and each s (E) the section R(X, Y )s := X Y s Y X s [X,Y ] s (E) 4. Scalar field in Minkowski space In order to construct the scalar eld model, we start from the vector bundle (E, p, M, V ), where E, V are inner product spaces and M is a Lorentzian manifold with metric