Relating Thomas-Whitehead projective connections by a gauge transformation (Q1876634)

Thomas-Whitehead projective connections (briefly TW-connections) have been originally studied by T. Y. Thomas and J. H. C. Whitehead in the 1920's and 1930's respectively. New aspects of TW-connections were studied by the present author in the 1990's. Given a manifold \(M\) one considers a principal bundle \(\mathcal{E}(M)\), called bundle of volume elements, whose structure group is \((\mathbb{R},+)\) and the (right) action is given by \(\varepsilon \cdot a =e^a \varepsilon\). \(\mathcal{E}(M)\) admits a canonical fundamental vector field \(\xi\), corresponding to \(d/dt\) in the Lie algebra of \(\mathbb{R}\). Then, a TW-connection is a torsion free linear connection \(\nabla\) on \(\mathcal{E}(M)\) which is invariant with respect to the action of \(\mathbb{R}\) on \(\mathcal{E}(M)\), and satisfies the condition \[ \nabla \xi =-\frac{1}{n+1}id, \] where \(id\) is the identity \((1,1)\)-tensor on \(\mathcal{E}(M)\). A TW-connection induces a projective structure on \(M\). Accordingly, two TW-connections are said to be equivalent if they induce the same projective structure. In the present paper two other notions of equivalence are studied: i) Ricci equivalent TW-connections; that is, TW-connections which are equivalent in the above sense and have identically equal Ricci tensors, ii) gauge equivalent TW-connections; that is, equivalent TW-connections which are related by a gauge transformation of \(\mathcal{E}(M)\). After studying conditions characterizing the above new equivalence notions, the author shows that gauge equivalent TW-connections are Ricci equivalent. Moreover, two TW-connections are gauge equivalent if and only if they are Ricci equivalent and the induced de Rham cohomology class of \(M\) vanishes. As a result, Ricci and gauge equivalence are identical if and only if \(H^1 (M, \mathbb{R})=0\).