Partial extensions of jets and the polar distribution on Grassmannians of non-maximal integral elements (Q897827)

The paper is devoted to the study of an intrinsic distribution, called polar, on the space of \(l\)-dimensional integral elements of the higher order contact structure on jet spaces. The main result establishes that this exterior differential system is the prolongation of a natural system of PDEs, named pasting conditions, on sections of the bundle of partial jet extensions. Informally, a partial jet extension is a \(k\)th order jet with additional \((k+1)\)st order information along \(l\) of the \(n\) possible directions. A choice of partial extensions of a jet into all possible \(l\)-directions satisfies the pasting conditions if the extensions coincide along pairwise intersecting \(l\)-directions. It is further shown that prolonging the polar distribution once more yields the space of \((l,n)\)-dimensional integral flags with its double fibration distribution. When \(l > 1\) the exterior differential system is holonomic, stabilizing after one further prolongation.