In this paper, nonholonomic gerbes will be naturally derived for manifolds and vector bundle spaces provided with nonintegrable distributions (in brief, nonholonomic spaces). An important example of such gerbes is related to distributions defining nonlinear connection (N–connection) structures. They geometrically unify and develop the concepts of Riemann–Cartan manifolds and Lagrange–Finsler sp...

The effect of the Coriolis force on a moving system can be described as a holonomy with respect to a particular connection known as the Cartan–Hannay–Berry connection. The resulting geometric phase is called the Hannay–Berry phase, and it provides direct information about the imposed motion on the system. This approach assumes that the imposed motion is adiabatic. In this paper we describe the ...

We elaborate an unified geometric approach to classical mechanics, Riemann–Finsler spaces and gravity theories on Lie algebroids provided with nonlinear connection (N–connection) structure. There are investigated the conditions when the fundamental geometric objects like the anchor, metric and linear connection, almost sympletic and related almost complex structures may be canonically defined b...

We express the first jet bundle of curves in Euclidean space as homogeneous spaces associated to a Galilean-type group. Certain Cartan connections on a manifold with values in the Lie algebra of the Galilean group are characterized as geometries associated to systems of second order ordinary differential equations. We show these Cartan connections admit a form of normal coordinates, and that in...

I. Introduction-a quick historical survey of geodesic flows on negatively curved spaces. II. Preliminaries on Riemannian manifolds A. Riemannian metric and Riemannian volume element B. Levi Civita connection and covariant differentiation along curves C. Parallel translation of vectors along curves D. Curvature E. Geodesics and geodesic flow F. Riemannian exponential map and Jacobi vector fields...

The role of space-time torsion in general relativity is reviewed in accordance with some recent results on the subject. It is shown that, according to the connection compatibility condition, the usual Riemannian volume element is not appropriate in the presence of torsion. A new volume element is proposed and used in the Lagrangian formulation for Einstein-Cartan theory of gravity. The dynamica...

This survey intends to introduce the reader to holonomy theory of Cartan connections. Special attention is given to the normal conformal Cartan connection, uniquely defined for a class of conformally equivalent metrics, and to its holonomy group the ’conformal holonomy group’. We explain the relation between conformal holonomy group and existence of Einstein metrics in the conformal class as we...

The objective of this article is to build up a general theory of geometrical optics for spinning light rays in an inhomogeneous and anisotropic medium modeled on a Finsler manifold. The prerequisites of local Finsler geometry are reviewed together with the main properties of the Cartan connection used in this work. Then, the principles of Finslerian spinoptics are formulated on the grounds of p...

We study the existence of natural and projectively equivariant quantizations for differential operators acting between order 1 vector bundles over a smooth manifold M . To that aim, we make use of the Thomas-Whitehead approach of projective structures and construct a Casimir operator depending on a projective Cartan connection. We attach a scalar parameter to every space of differential operato...

Through the analyses of volume-forms in differentiable manifolds, it is shown that the usual way of defining minimal action principles for field theory on curved spacetimes is not appropriate on non-riemannian manifolds. An alternative approach, based in a new volume-form, is proposed and confronted with the standard one. The new volume element is explicitly used in the study of Einstein-Cartan...