Affine submersions (Q762471)

An affinely connected manifold is a pair (M,\(\nabla)\) where M is a connected smooth manifold and \(\nabla\) is a linear connection on M. Let (M,\(\nabla)\) and (M',\(\nabla ')\) be affinely connected manifolds and let \(f: M\to M'\) be an affine map; that is, \(f_*\) commutes with the linear parallel transports in T(M) and T(M') induced by \(\nabla\) and \(\nabla '\), respectively. We show that if f is a submersion and \(\nabla\) is complete, then f is a Serre fibration and \(\nabla '\) is complete. As a consequence we obtain N. Hick's generalization of the theorem of W. Ambrose concerning local isometries between Riemannian manifolds. Let (M,\(\nabla)\) be an affinely connected manifold and let F be a codimension q foliation of M. We say F is affine if F can be defined by an N-cocycle \(\{(U_{\alpha},f_{\alpha},g_{\alpha \beta})\}\) where N is a (not necessarily connected) q-dimensional manifold with a linear connection and each \(f_{\alpha}: U_{\alpha}\to N\) is an affine submersion. We study the homotopy and homology groups of the leaves of affine foliations of codimension one and we obtain a structure theorem for affine foliations of arbitrary codimension in the case where the connection on the ambient manifold is invariant by parallelism. As an application we prove a decomposition theorem for reductive homogeneous spaces and as a corollary we obtain a decomposition theorem for affine symmetric spaces which generalizes the well-known decomposition theorem for Riemannian symmetric spaces.