Universality of the divergence
Algebraists asked whether or not an operator on the module of smooth sections of the tangent bundle over the commutative ring of smooth functions of a smooth (orientable) manifold (can be any piece of a compact or a complete manifold) \(M\) can be characterized by two axioms, which are as follows: a linear operator \(D:\mathfrak{X}(M) \rightarrow \mathcal{A}(M)\) from smooth sections \(\mathfrak{X}(M)\) of the tangent bundle \(TM\) to the ring of all smooth sections \(\mathcal{A}(M)\) is a divergence operator if \(D\) is a 1-cocycle in the sense that \(D[X_1, X_2] = [D(X_1),X_2]+ [X_1, D(X_2)]\) for any vector fields \(X_1, X_2\in \mathfrak{X}(M)\) and \(D(f\cdot X) = f D(X) + X(f)\) for any \(f\in \mathcal{A}(M)\) and \(X\in \mathfrak{X}(M)\).\N\NRecall that for a Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\), the divergence operator \(\text{div}\) on a vector field \(X\) is defined by taking the trace of the linear map \(Y\mapsto \nabla_Y X\), where \(\nabla\) is the Levi-Civita connection. If \(G=\det(g_{ij})\) with respect to a local coordinate chart, and \(X = \sum_{i=1}^n X^i \frac{\partial}{\partial x^i}\), then \(\text{div}(X) = \sum \frac{1}{\sqrt{G}}\frac{\partial}{\partial x^i}(\sqrt{G}X^i)\). For a volume form \(\Omega\), the divergence is defined as \(L_X\Omega =\text{div}_{\Omega}(X)\Omega\).\N\NIn this note, L. Ni and Y. Zhang confirm this for any simply connected (or more generally, smooth) manifold M under the assumption that \(H^1(M,\mathbb{R}) = {0}\). That is, if \(M\) is an orientable manifold with a vanishing \(H^1(M,\mathbb{R})\), then a linear operator \(D\) satisfies the two axioms above if and only if \(D\) is the divergence operator \(\text{div}_{\Omega}\) with respect to some volume form \(\Omega\) on \(M\).
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