Relative Poincaré lemma 2026-10-14
Let a neighborhood of a submanifold retract onto it by fiberwise radial contraction in a tubular neighborhood. If a closed differential form pulls back to zero on the submanifold, the radial homotopy formula gives , with vanishing along the zero section. Applying the homotopy operator to gives the primitive directly. This is the relative ingredient in the relative Moser theorem.
A Lagrangian complement to in is identified with by . This produces a vector bundle isomorphism that is the identity on and carries the canonical pairing to . A suitably chosen tubular neighborhood map therefore matches the ambient two-forms along , enabling the relative Moser theorem.
A smooth embedded submanifold has a neighborhood diffeomorphic to a neighborhood of the zero section of its normal bundle, with the zero section identified with the submanifold. One may prescribe the normal-bundle splitting of the derivative along that section. Choose a Riemannian metric making the splitting orthogonal and use its normal exponential map: its derivative there is the required isomorphism, so the inverse function theorem supplies local diffeomorphisms. A sufficiently small, possibly varying, fibre radius makes these fit into a tubular neighborhood.