Determinacy and unipotency (Q1078859)

The original work of Mather giving necessary and sufficient conditions for finite determinacy of smooth map-germs (e.g. up to right-left equivalence) gave very poor estimates of the degree of determinacy, although these have subsequently been considerably improved. The object of this paper is to give much sharper results with a good deal more flexibility. This allows, for example, applications to the equivariant case, to determinacy modulo a conveniently chosen subspace, and to bifurcation theory. Such estimates can be used as an effective tool in classification problems. Under certain circumstances, necessary and sufficient conditions are obtained. Although the method can be derived from an elementary iterative construction, it is most clearly expressed using properties of actions of unipotent algebraic groups. The known result here that orbits are closed leads (under appropriate conditions) to intimate relations between orbits and their tangent spaces which allows the derivation of the main results. Thus an affine subspace X of a vector space on which a unipotent group acts is contained in a single orbit provided the tangent space T(x) at some \(x\in X\) to its orbit contains all other T(y) as well as the tangent space to X. A typical result is that if G is a ''jet-closed, unipotent'' group of contact equivalences acting on \(C^{\infty}(n,p)\); M a vector subspace such that there is an induced action on the quotient, then f is M-G- determined if and only if, for some s, f is s-G-determined and \(J^ sM\subset LG.j^ sf\).