CARTAN CONNECTION AND CURVATURE FORMS Syafiq Johar syafi
[email protected] Contents 1 Connections and Riemannian Curvature 1 1.1 Affine Connection . .1 1.2 Levi-Civita Connection and Riemannian Curvature . .2 1.3 Riemannian Curvature . .3 2 Covariant External Derivative 4 2.1 Connection Form . .4 2.2 Curvature Form . .5 2.3 Explicit Formula for E = TM ..................................5 2.4 Levi-Civita Connection and Riemannian Curvature Revisited . .6 3 An Application: Uniformisation Theorem via PDEs 6 1 Connections and Riemannian Curvature Cartan formula is a way of generalising the Riemannian curvature for a Riemannian manifold (M; g) of dimension n to a differentiable manifold. We start by defining the Riemannian manifold and curvatures. We begin by defining the usual notion of connection and the Levi-Civita connection. 1.1 Affine Connection Definition 1.1 (Affine connection). Let M be a differentiable manifold and E a vector bundle over M. A connection or covariant derivative at a point p 2 M is a map D : Γ(E) ! Γ(T ∗M ⊗ E) with the 1 properties for any V; W 2 TpM; σ; τ 2 Γ(E) and f 2 C (M), we have that DV σ 2 Ep with the following properties: 1. D is tensorial over TpM i.e. DfV +W σ = fDV σ + DW σ: 2. D is R-linear in Γ(E) i.e. DV (σ + τ) = DV σ + DV τ: 3. D satisfies the Leibniz rule over Γ(E) i.e. if f 2 C1(M), we have DV (fσ) = df(V ) · σ + fDV σ: Note that we did not require any condition of the metric g on the manifold, nor the bundle metric on E in the abstract definition of a connection.