The differential structure of an orbifold (Q521298): Difference between revisions

An effective orbifold is a Hausdorff, paracompact, second-countable topological space equipped with an equivalence class of effective orbifold atlases. An effective orbifold atlas consists of: (1) a set of orbifold charts \((U,G,\pi)\) with \(U\subset \mathbb R^n, G<\text{Diff}(U)\) and \(\pi:U\rightarrow X\) that induces a homeomorphism from \(U/G\) to an open subset of \(X\); (2) a set of embeddings between orbifold charts. Given an effective orbifold, the author defines a (Sikorski) differential structure by using smooth functions over this orbifold. The main topic of this paper is to prove that the orbifold charts and atlas of an orbifold can be reconstructed from the differential structure associated to the orbifold structure. This is a generalization of the classical result that the smooth manifold structure over a Hausdorff, paracompact, second-countable topological space is determined by the structure of the smooth functions on it. On the other hand, there is a one-to-one correspondence between orbifolds and Morita equivalence classes of effective proper étale Lie groupoids. Moreover proper étale Lie groupoids with bibundles (i.e. Hilsum-Skandalis maps) as arrows and isomorphisms of bibundles as 2-arrows form a weak 2-category. The author then constructs a functor \(F\) from the weak 2-category of effective proper étale Lie groupoids to the category of differential spaces and shows that this functor is essentially injective on objects, i.e. if \(F(\mathcal G)\cong F(\mathcal H)\), then the proper étale Lie groupoids \(\mathcal G\) and \(\mathcal H\) are Morita equivalent to each other. Orbifolds are also related to diffeological spaces. The author also proves that there is a functor \(G\) from the weak 2-category of effective proper étale Lie groupoids to the category of diffeological spaces that is essentially injective on objects.