Connections Adapted to Non-Negatively Graded Structures

Abstract

Graded bundles are a particularly nice class of graded manifolds and represent a natural generalisation of vector bundles. By exploiting the formalism of supermanifolds to describe Lie algebroids we define the notion of a weighted $A$-connection on a graded bundle. In a natural sense weighted $A$-connections are adapted to the basic geometric structure of a graded bundle in the same way as linear $A$-connections are adapted to the structure of a vector bundle. This notion generalises directly to multi-graded bundles and in particular we present the notion of a bi-weighted $A$-connection on a double vector bundle. We prove the existence of such adapted connections and use them to define (quasi-)actions of Lie algebroids on graded bundles.

19 pages. Accepted for publication in the International Journal of Geometric Methods in Modern Physics