Manifold & Manifold with Boundary

An -dimensional manifold, or -manifold (without boundary) for short, is a Hausdorff and second-countable topological space with the property that each point has a neighbourhood that is homeomorphic to an open subset of . A manifold with boundary is a Hausdorff and second-countable topological space such that each point has a neighbourhood homeomorphic to an open subset of the closed half-space . The boundary of is the set of points that correspond to points in with . A closed manifold is a compact manifold with no boundary.

Clearly, on a manifold, there might be different collections of homeomorphisms that makes it locally Euclidean. So we introduce:

Chart and Atlas

A chart for a manifold is a homeomorphism where is open in and is open in . A collection of charts is called an atlas for if . A manifold equipped with an atlas is called a topological manifold.

e.g.

  • Consider the set with the usual topology. and are both differentiable atlases. They are not compatible since the union is not differentiable.
  • The sphere is a closed subset of Euclidean space, thus the topological requirements are satisfied. Define the following two maps: as follows: We write as where and , we take and . Then we have

Compatible Charts & Smooth Atlas

Two charts and are compatible if is a diffeomorphism. Let be an -dimensional manifold. An atlas for is differentiable or smooth if for every and in , the map and are compatible.

Compatible Atlases & Maximal Atlas

Two differentiable atlases and are compatible if their union is also a differentiable atlas. A smooth atlas is called maximal if it is not contained in any other atlas. In other words, a maximal atlas is the one that contains all charts of that are compatible with .

Proposition

Two differentiable atlases and are compatible if and only if for every chart in and in , both and are smooth.

Smooth Manifold

A -structure on a manifold is an equivalence class of differentiable atlases, where two atlases are deemed equivalent if they are *-compatible. A smooth manifold is a manifold together with a smooth () structure on .

e.g.

  • A given manifold can carry many different atlases: For example, if we can take two charts and . Then both and are smooth atlases for , they define different smooth atlases, while they are compatible.
  • The 4-manifold is a topological manifold, but not smooth.

In fact, dimension 4 is particularly special and exotic in the theory of smooth manifolds, there are smooth 4-manifolds which are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic. We have the following theorem:

Theorem

for all has a unique smooth structure. has uncountably many smooth structures.

Submanifolds

Submanifold of

A subset is a -dimensional submanifold of , if for every there exists an open set containing and a diffeomorphism such that , with . We call such a map a submanifold chart for at .

e.g.

Proposition

Any -dimensional submanifold of is a smooth manifold.

There are several equivalent ways to define submanifolds:

Proposition

Let be a subset of . The following are equivalent:

  1. is a -dimensional submanifold of ;
  2. is locally the graph of a smooth function. That is, for every , there is a neighbourhood of in , a linear injection and a complementary linear injection ,
    an open subset , and a smooth map such that
  3. is locally the level set of a submersion. That is, for every , there is a neighbourhood of in and a submersion such that
  4. is locally the image of an embedding. That is, for every , there exists a neighbourhood of in , an open set , and a smooth embedding such that .

Embedded Submanifold

Suppose is a smooth manifold with or without boundary. An embedded (or regular) submanifold of is a subset that is a manifold (without boundary) in the subspace topology, endowed with a smooth structure with respect to which the inclusion map is a smooth embedding.

Open Submanifold Lemma

An open subset of a manifold is a manifold of the same dimension.

Proof Let be an -dimensional smooth manifold. Suppose is open, and is an atlas of . Consider the restricted atlas which covers . Since each ​ is open in , and is open in , so is open in and hence open in the subspace topology on . Moreover, on overlaps, the transition maps are also smooth, and remains Hausdorff and second countable.