Infinitely Many Tangent Functors on Diffeological Spaces

Abstract

We study tangent spaces in the setting of diffeological spaces. Several distinct tangent functors have been introduced, each of which extends the classical tangent functor from smooth manifolds. In this paper, we construct infinitely many non-isomorphic tangent functors on diffeological spaces. We compare our constructions with existing models, including the internal and external tangent spaces. Our results show that the choice of tangent functor is far from unique outside smooth manifolds.