Dirac products and concurring Dirac structures

TL;DR

This paper introduces dual operations on Dirac structures, especially the novel cotangent product, and explores their properties, leading to a new notion of compatibility called concurrence, with applications in Poisson geometry and generalized complex structures.

Contribution

It defines and analyzes tangent and cotangent products on Dirac structures, introduces the concept of concurrence as a compatibility condition, and demonstrates their applications in geometry.

Findings

Explicit description of leaves of the tangent product

Concurrence captures commuting Poisson structures

Dirac products unify and clarify structures in Poisson geometry

Abstract

We discuss in this note two dual canonical operations on Dirac structures $L$ and $R$ -- the \emph{tangent product} $L \star R$ and the \emph{cotangent product} $L \circledast R$. Our first result gives an explicit description of the leaves of $L \star R$ in terms of those of $L$ and $R$, surprisingly ruling out the pathologies which plague general ``induced Dirac structures''. In contrast to the tangent product, the more novel contangent product $L \circledast R$ need not be Dirac even if smooth. When it is, we say that $L$ and $R$ \emph{concur}. Concurrence captures commuting Poison structures, refines the \emph{Dirac pairs} of Dorfman and Kosmann-Schwarzbach, and it is our proposal as the natural notion of ``compatibility'' between Dirac structures. The rest of the paper is devoted to illustrating the usefulness of tangent- and cotangent products in general, and the notion of concurrence in particular. Dirac products clarify old constructions in Poisson geometry, characterize Dirac structures which can be pushed forward by a smooth map, and mandate a version of a local normal form. Magri and Morosi's $P\Omega$-condition and Vaisman's notion of two-forms complementary to a Poisson structures are found to be instances of concurrence, as is the setting for the Frobenius-Nirenberg theorem. We conclude the paper with an interpretation in the style of Magri and Morosi of generalized complex structures which concur with their conjugates.