I have placed a preprint on the arXiv ‘Jacobi structures up to homotopy’ (arXiv:1507.00454 [math.DG]) which is joint work with Alfonso G. Tortorella (a PhD student from Universita degli Studi di Firenze, Italy). Our motivation for the work comes from the increasing presence of higher Poisson and Schouten structures in mathematical physics.

In the preprint we ask and answer the question of ‘how to equip sections of (even) line bundles over a supermanifold with the structure of an L_∞-algebra’.

It turns out that the most conceptionally simple way to do this is to adopt the philosophy of [1] and study homogeneous higher Poisson geometry. In essence, we take the ‘higher Poissonisation’ of a ‘homotopy Kirillov structure’ as the starting definition. In this way we go around trying to carefully define homotopy Kirillov structure in the so-called ‘intrinsic set-up’; which would be quite complicated for non-trivial line bundles. We define a higher Kirillov manifold as a principal ℜ^x-bundle equipped with a homogeneous higher Poisson structure.

We also study the notion of a higher Kirillov algebroid, which is essentially a higher Kirillov manifold with an addition compatible regular action of ℜ. This additional action encodes a vector bundle structure [2].

Interestingly, from the structure of a higher Kirillov algebroid we derive a line bundle equipped with a ‘higher representation’ of an associated L_∞-algebroid. This is very similar to the classical case of Jacobi algebroids and is a geometric realisation of Sh Lie-Rinehart representations as define by Vitagliano [4]. As a special example we see that the line bundle underlying a higher Kirillov manifold comes equipped with a higher representation of the first jet vector bundle of the said line bundle (which is naturally an L_∞-algebroid).

Finally we present the higher BV-algebra associated with a higher Kirillov manifold following the ideas of Vaisman [3].

References
[1] J. Grabowski, Graded contact manifolds and contact Courant algebroids, J. Geom. Phys. 68 (2013) 27-58.

[2] J. Grabowski & M. Rotkiewicz, Higher vector bundles and multi-graded symplectic manifolds, J. Geom. Phys. 59 (2009), 1285-1305

[3] I. Vaisman, Annales Polonici Mathematici (2000) Volume: 73, Issue: 3, page 275-290.

[4] L. Vitagliano, Representations of Homotopy Lie-Rinehart Algebras, Math. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 158 (2015) 155-191.