Green hyperbolic complexes on Lorentzian manifolds

Abstract

We develop a homological generalization of Green hyperbolic operators, called Green hyperbolic complexes, which cover many examples of derived critical loci for gauge-theoretic quadratic action functionals in Lorentzian signature. We define Green hyperbolic complexes through a generalization of retarded and advanced Green's operators, called retarded and advanced Green's homotopies, which are shown to be unique up to a contractible space of choices. We prove homological generalizations of the most relevant features of Green hyperbolic operators, namely that (1) the retarded-minus-advanced cochain map is a quasi-isomorphism, (2) a differential pairing (generalizing the usual fiber-wise metric) on a Green hyperbolic complex leads to covariant and fixed-time Poisson structures and (3) the retarded-minus-advanced cochain map is compatible with these Poisson structures up to homotopy.