Everything about Line Bundle totally explained
In
mathematics, a
line bundle expresses the concept of a line that varies from point to point of a space. For example a curve in the plane having a
tangent line at each point determines a varying line: the
tangent bundle is a way of organising these. More formally, in
algebraic topology and
differential topology a line bundle is defined as a
vector bundle of rank 1.
There is an evident difference between one-dimensional real line bundles (as just described) and one-dimensional
complex line bundles. In fact the topology of the 1×1
invertible real matrices and complex matrices is entirely different: the first of those is a space
homotopy equivalent to a discrete two-point space (positive and negative reals contracted down), while the second has the homotopy type of a
circle.
A real line bundle is therefore in the eyes of
homotopy theory as good as a
fiber bundle with a two-point fiber - a double covering. This reminds one of the
orientation double cover on a
differential manifold: indeed that's a special case in which the line bundle is the determinant bundle (top
exterior power) of the tangent bundle. The
Möbius strip corresponds to a double cover of the circle (the θ → 2θ mapping) and can be viewed as we wish as having fibre two points, the
unit interval or the real line: the data are equivalent.
In the case of the complex line bundle, we're looking in fact also for
circle bundles. There are some celebrated ones, for example the
Hopf fibrations of
spheres to spheres.
Determinant bundles
In general if
V is a vector bundle on a space
X, with constant fibre dimension
n, the
n-th
exterior power of
V taken fibre-by-fibre is a line bundle, called the
determinant line bundle. This construction is in particular applied to the
cotangent bundle of a
smooth manifold. The resulting determinant bundle is responsible for the phenomenon of
tensor densities, in the sense that for an
orientable manifold it has a global section, and its tensor powers with any real exponent may be defined and used to 'twist' any vector bundle by
tensor product.
Characteristic classes, universal bundles and classifying spaces
The first Stiefel-Whitney class classifies smooth real line bundles; in particular, the collection of (equivalence classes of) real line bundles are in correspondence with elements of the first cohomology with Z/2 coefficients; this correspondence is in fact an isomorphism of abelian groups (the group operations being tensor product of line bundles and the usual addition on cohomology). Analogously, the first Chern class classifies smooth complex line bundles on a space, and the group of line bundles is isomorphic to the second cohomology class with integer coefficients. However, bundles can have equivalent smooth structures (and thus the same first Chern class) but different holomorphic structures. The Chern class statements are easily proven using the
exponential sequence of
sheaves on the manifold.
One can more generally view the classification problem from a homotopy theoretic point of view. There are universal bundles for real line bundles (respectively, complex line bundles). According to general theory about
classifying spaces, we should look for
contractible spaces on which there are
group actions of the respective groups
C2 and
S1, that are free actions. Those spaces can serve as the universal
principal bundles, and the quotients for the actions as the classifying spaces
BG. In these cases we can find those explicitly, in the infinite-dimensional analogues of real and complex
projective space.
Therefore the classifying space
BC2 is of the homotopy type of
RP∞, the real projective space given by an infinite sequence of
homogeneous coordinates. It carries the universal real line bundle; in terms of homotopy theory that means that any real line bundle
L on a
CW complex X determines a
classifying map from
X to
RP∞, making
L a bundle isomorphic to the pullback of the universal bundle. This classifying map can be used to define the
Stiefel-Whitney class of
L, in the first cohomology of
X with
Z/2
Z coefficients, from a standard class on
RP∞.
In an analogous way, the complex projective space
CP carries a universal complex line bundle. In this case classifying maps give rise to the first
Chern class of
X, in H
2(
X) (integral cohomology).
There is a further, analogous theory with
quaternionic (real dimension four) line bundles. This gives rise to one of the
Pontryagin classes, in real four-dimensional cohomology.
In this way foundational cases for the theory of
characteristic classes depend only on line bundles. According to a general
splitting principle this can determine the rest of the theory (if not explicitly).
There are theories of
holomorphic line bundles on
complex manifolds, and
invertible sheaves in
algebraic geometry, that work out a line bundle theory in those areas.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Line Bundle'.
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