Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2002 iii Paper 74 7 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
A principal bundle with structural Lie group is locally a product , with changes of trivialization of the form . Define a right action locally by . It is independent of trivialization because . It is smooth and obeys the group-action law. Right multiplication in is free and transitive, so the global action is free and each fiber is a single orbit. Equivalently these properties and equivariant local triviality can be included in the definition of a principal bundle.
For a representation , form the associated vector bundleProjection sends to the base point of . A local section gives coordinates and hence a local product ; on overlaps the principal transition functions act through . Because these maps are linear in , the fibers have well-defined vector-space structures.
For an -dimensional manifold, its frame bundle has points that are linear isomorphisms. Right action is composition for . Coordinate frames provide local trivializations. Its associated bundle for the defining representation is the tangent bundle, by the well-defined map . A metric restricts the frames to linear isometries and reduces the group to ; choosing orientation gives the corresponding special-orthogonal reduction.
In Minkowski spacetime choose a reference oriented pseudo-orthonormal frame at the origin. Every such frame is specified by its base point and a Lorentz transformation . The Poincaré group has multiplicationand its right Lorentz action is . Henceis the oriented orthonormal frame bundle of Minkowski spacetime. The same argument with gives the full unoriented bundle. If time orientation is fixed, use the orthochronous components throughout; the use of in the printed quotient is an orientation reduction.
For four-dimensional de Sitter spacetime, use the spacelike hyperboloid in . An element of maps a fixed unit spacelike vector to , and its other columns give an oriented pseudo-orthonormal tangent frame. The stabilizer of that unit vector is . This identifies the oriented frame bundle of de Sitter spacetime and its projection:The right stabilizer action changes the tangent frame without changing .
For Anti-de Sitter spacetime, take in . A unit timelike normal has orthogonal complement of signature , so its stabilizer is again . Appending this normal to a tangent frame realizes the oriented orthonormal frame bundle of anti-de Sitter spacetime asConnected components or orientation/time-orientation restrictions must be chosen consistently. This quotient is the anti-de Sitter quadric, which has a periodic timelike coordinate. If “anti-de Sitter spacetime” denotes its universal cover, pull the frame bundle back to that cover, rather than identify the covered spacetime with the unmodified quotient.