Principal bundles of embeddings and nonlinear Grassmannians (Q465482)

This papers studies the Fréchet geometry of certain spaces of embeddings. It is known (see [\textit{A. Kriegl} and \textit{P. W. Michor}, The convenient setting of global analysis. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society (1997; Zbl 0889.58001)]) that the space of embeddings of a given smooth manifold into another smooth manifold carries the structure of a principal bundle for the action of the group of smooth diffeomorphisms of the source manifold. The base space is called non-linear Grassmannian. The authors establish several extensions and variants of this statement. In particular, they prove that it still holds for compact manifolds having non-empty boundary and describe the Fréchet structure of the associated nonlinear Grassmannian. They also establish several variants of the above theorem for the action of the group of volume preserving diffeomorphisms on smooth embeddings and on smooth volume preserving embeddings. This study is motivated by certain questions related to fluid dynamics.