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Cotangent bundle


In mathematics, especially differential geometry, the cotangent bundle of a smooth manifold is the vector bundle of all the cotangent spaces at every point in the manifold. It may be described also as the dual bundle to the tangent bundle.

Smooth sections of the cotangent bundle are differential one-forms.

Let M be a smooth manifold and let M×M be the Cartesian product of M with itself. The diagonal mapping Δ sends a point p in M to the point (p,p) of M×M. The image of Δ is called the diagonal. Let be the sheaf of germs of smooth functions on M×M which vanish on the diagonal. Then the quotient sheaf consists of equivalence classes of functions which vanish on the diagonal modulo higher order terms. The cotangent sheaf is the pullback of this sheaf to M:


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