A principal bundle with structure group has a smooth free right -action, each fibre is a single orbit, and it is locally equivariantly isomorphic to . A representation defines the associated vector bundle
Local sections of identify with , and changes of section act by on the fibre coordinates.
A principal bundle is trivial if and only if it has a global smooth section. Given , the map is an equivariant isomorphism : freeness and transitivity give its unique inverse on each fibre, and local trivializations make that inverse smooth. Conversely a product bundle has section . This proves principal bundle trivialization by a global section. A contractible paracompact base is a sufficient condition for triviality of such a bundle; local sections alone are insufficient on a general base.
A manifold is parallelizable when its tangent bundle is trivial, equivalently when it possesses a global smooth frame. The circle is an example, with its nowhere-vanishing unit tangent field. The sphere is another: regard it as the unit quaternions. At a unit quaternion , the three tangent vectors are independent and smoothly depend on . Quaternion multiplication preserves the norm, so these form an orthonormal frame. This gives the quaternionic left-invariant frame on the three-sphere.
For any Lie group of dimension , choose a basis of . Left translations define
These fields are smooth; at every , the differential of the diffeomorphism is invertible, so they are a basis of . Hence every Lie group manifold is parallelizable, as in parallelization of a Lie group by left translations.
For a real semisimple Lie group, let be the Killing form. It is nondegenerate and invariant under the adjoint action. Left translating gives a bi-invariant pseudo-Riemannian metric. For left-invariant fields, the Koszul formula reduces to
Thus . The curvature convention of Question 1 gives
To obtain the Ricci tensor, trace the linear map . Since ,
This proves the Killing-form Einstein metric construction for every real semisimple group. If is compact semisimple, is positive definite and its Ricci tensor is , giving a Riemannian Einstein metric. For a noncompact semisimple group the general Killing-form construction is indefinite. Thus the unrestricted assertion is understood in the pseudo-Riemannian sense appropriate here; positive definiteness is not obtained by simply taking in the noncompact case.
Rescale the ambient coordinates by . For each and , take the relatively open set where . Define a manifold chart by retaining all the except :
Here is the open unit open unit ball. The inverse of this manifold chart is explicit:
The coordinate labels in retain their original indices. All the are nonzero, so this inverse exists; the strictly positive radicand makes it smooth on the whole open open unit ball. Projection and this inverse are continuous, so each manifold chart is a homeomorphism onto an open subset of .
These manifold charts cover the ellipsoid, because at every point at least one is nonzero. On an overlap with a different chart , the coordinates of are the retained for together with
Its domain is the open subset of . The displayed functions, and the reverse transition functions obtained by exchanging , are smooth. Transitions between identical charts are the identity; opposite-sign charts with the same omitted coordinate do not overlap. The ambient subspace topology is Hausdorff and second countable, as it is inherited from Euclidean space. Thus this coordinate-projection atlas of an ellipsoid is a smooth atlas, proving the ellipsoid is a smooth manifold of dimension . The rescaling also gives a diffeomorphism with the unit sphere .
For the three-sphere, use its identification with SU(2) rather than separate local constructions. With the Pauli matrices , put . These form a real basis of the SU(2) Lie algebra and satisfy
For , the identification SU(2) as the three-sphere is
The matrix is unitary with determinant one. Conversely, every SU(2) matrix has this form, and both the correspondence and its inverse are smooth.
The left translations are diffeomorphisms. Define three left-invariant vector fields by
Matrix multiplication makes these vector fields smooth globally. Since is an isomorphism from the SU(2) Lie algebra to , the three vectors are linearly independent at every point, and each is nowhere zero. This is the parallelization of a Lie group by left translations.
Transporting the left-invariant vector fields to the three-sphere gives the quaternionic left-invariant frame on the three-sphere:
Directly, and on the unit three-sphere. Thus the vectors are tangent and form a global orthonormal frame of a vector bundle. The three-sphere is a parallelizable manifold, with tangent bundle .