- Theodore Voronov, University of Manchester
- From homotopy Lie brackets to thick morphisms of supermanifolds and non-linear functional-algebraic duality (NOTE UNUSUAL DAY)
- 01/31/2023
- 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
- C204A Wells Hall
- Michael Shapiro (mshapiro@msu.edu)
I will give a motivation for homotopy Lie brackets and the corresponding morphisms preserving brackets "up to homotopy" (more precisely, for L-infinity morphisms and L-infinity algebras), and show how to describe them using supergeometry. So, instead of a single Poisson or Lie bracket, there is a whole sequence of operations with n arguments, n=1,2,3,..., satisfying a linked infinite sequence of identities replacing the familiar Jacobi identity for a Lie bracket; and, instead of a morphism as a linear map mapping a bracket to a bracket, there is a sequence of multi-linear mappings mixing brackets with different numbers of arguments, and, in particular, the binary bracket is preserved only up to an (algebraic) homotopy. Geometrically, such a sequence of multi-linear mappings assembles into one non-linear map of supermanifolds.
For the case of homotopy brackets of functions ("higher Poisson" or "homotopy Poisson" structure), this leads us to the question about a natural construction of non-linear mappings between algebras of smooth functions generalizing the usual pull-backs. I discovered such a construction some years ago. These are "thick morphisms" of (super)manifolds generalizing ordinary smooth maps. From a more general perspective, we arrive in this way at a non-linear analog of the classical functional-algebraic duality between spaces and algebras.
