Projectively Invariant Star Products

Abstract

It is shown that a (curved) projective structure on a smooth manifold determines on the Poisson algebra of smooth, fiberwise-polynomial functions on the cotangent bundle a one-parameter family of graded star products. For a particular value of the parameter (corresponding to half-densities) the star product is symmetric, and specializes in the projectively flat case to the one constructed previously by C. Duval, P. Lecomte, and V. Ovsienko. A limiting form of this family of star products yields a commutative deformation of the symmetric tensor algebra of the manifold. A basic ingredient of the proofs is the construction of projectively invariant multilinear operators on bundles of weighted symmetric k-vectors. The construction works except for a discrete set of excluded weights and generalizes the Rankin-Cohen brackets of modular forms.