The standard cohomology of regular Courant algebroids

Abstract

For any regular Courant algebroid $E$ over a smooth manifold $M$ with characteristic distribution $F$ and ample Lie algebroid $A_E$, we prove that there exists a canonical homological vector field on the graded manifold $A_E[1] \oplus (TM/F)^\ast[2]$ such that the resulting dg manifold $\mathcal{M}_E$, which we call the minimal model of the Courant algebroid $E$, encodes all cohomological information of $E$. Indeed, the standard cohomology of $E$ can be identified with the cohomology of the function space on $\mathcal{M}_E$, which can be computed by a Hodge-to-de Rham type spectral sequence. We apply this result to generalized exact Courant algebroids and those arising from regular Lie algebroids.