Curvature of Poisson pencils in dimension three

Article history: Received 28 December 2012 Available online 14 June 2013 Communicated by T.S. Ratiu MSC: 37K10 53D17 53A60 A Poisson pencil is called flat if all brackets of the pencil can be simultaneously locally brought to a constant form. Given a Poisson pencil on a 3-manifold, we study under which conditions it is flat. Since the works of Gelfand and Zakharevich, it is known that a pencil is flat if and only if the associated Veronese web is trivial. We suggest a simpler obstruction to flatness, which we call the curvature form of a Poisson pencil. This form can be defined in two ways: either via the Blaschke curvature form of the associated web, or via the Ricci tensor of a connection compatible with the pencil. We show that the curvature form of a Poisson pencil can be given by a simple explicit formula. This allows us to study flatness of linear pencils on three-dimensional Lie algebras, in particular those related to the argument translation method. Many of them appear to be non-flat. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.