Differential bundles and fibrations for tangent categories

Abstract

Tangent categories are categories equipped with a tangent functor: an endofunctor with certain natural transformations which make it behave like the tangent bundle functor on the category of smooth manifolds. They provide an abstract setting for differential geometry by axiomatizing key aspects of the subject which allow the basic theory of these geometric settings to be captured. Importantly, they have models not only in classical differential geometry and its extensions, but also in algebraic geometry, combinatorics, computer science, and physics. This paper develops the theory of "differential bundles" for such categories, considers their relation to "differential objects", and develops the theory of fibrations of tangent categories. Differential bundles generalize the notion of smooth vector bundles in classical differential geometry. However, the definition departs from the standard one in several significant ways: in general, there is no scalar multiplication in the fibres of these bundles, and in general these bundles need not be locally trivial. To understand how these differential bundles relate to differential objects, which are the generalization of vector spaces in smooth manifolds, requires some careful handling of the behaviour of pullbacks with respect to the tangent functor. This is captured by "transverse" and "display" systems for tangent categories, which leads one into the fibrational theory of tangent categories. A key example of a tangent fibration is provided by the "display" differential bundles of a tangent category with a display system. Strikingly, in such examples the fibres are Cartesian differential categories demonstrating a -- not unexpected -- tight connection between the theory of these categories and that of tangent categories.