The Fr\"olicher-Nijenhuis bracket in non-commutative differential geometry

Abstract

We carry over to a quite general noncommutative setting some of the basic tools of differential geometry, using from the very beginning the setting of convenient vector spaces developed by Froelicher and Kriegl, which allows to carry all of multilinear algebra into this kind of functional analysis with suitably completed tensor products. In the first section we give a short description of the setting of convenient spaces elaborating those aspects which are needed later. Then we repeat the usual construction of noncommutative differential forms for convenient algebras. Next they show that the bimodule $\Omega\sb n (A)$ of universal non-commutative $n$-forms represents the functor of the normalized Hochschild $n$-cocycles. In the third section we introduce the noncommutative version of the Froelicher-Nijenhuis bracket by investigating all bounded graded derivations of the algebra of differential forms. This bracket is then used to formulate the concept of integrability and involutiveness for distributions and to indicate a route towards a theorem of Frobenius. This is then used to discuss bundles and connections in the noncommutative setting and to go some steps towards a noncommutative Chern-Weil homomorphism. In the final section we give a brief description of the noncommutative version of the Schouten-Nijenhuis bracket and describe Poisson structures.