Our paper ‘Graded bundles in the Category of Lie Groupoids‘, written with K. Grabowska and J. Grabowski, has now been published in the journal Symmetry, Integrability and Geometry: Methods and Applications (SIGMA).

In this paper we define weighed Lie groupoids as Lie groupoids with a compatible action of the multiplicative monoid of reals. Such actions are known as homogeneity structures [1]. Compatibility means that the action for any ‘time’ acts as a morphism of Lie groupoids. These actions encode a non-negative integer grading on the Lie groupoid compatible with the groupoid structure, and so we have a kind of ‘graded Lie groupoid’. Importantly, weighted Lie groupoids form a nice generalisation of VB-groupoids (VB = Vector Bundle), which can be defined as a Lie groupoids with regular homogeneity structures [2].

Based on our earlier work [3], in which we similarly define weighed Lie algebroids, we present the basics of weighted Lie theory. In particular we show that weighted Lie algebroids and weighted Lie groupoids are related by more-or-less standard Lie theory: we just need to use Lie II to integrate the action of the homogeneity structure on the weighted Lie algebroid.

The main point here is that we not only naturally generalise ‘VB-objects’, we simplify working with them. In particular, VB-objects require that the homogeneity structure be regular as this encodes a vector bundle structure [4]. The nice, but somewhat technical results of Bursztyn, Cabrera and del Hoyo [2] rely on showing that regularity of the homogeneity structure is preserved under ‘differentiation’ and ‘integration’. That is, when you pass from a groupoid to an algebroid and vice versa. Differentiation is no problem here, but integration is a much tougher question.

However, if we now consider VB-objects as sitting inside the larger category of weighted-objects then we can forget about the preservation of regularity during integration and simply check after that regularity is preserved. Bursztyn et al forced themselves to work in a smaller and not so nice category. We showed that working in this larger category of weighted-objects can simplify working with VB-objects.

Along side this, we show that there are plenty of nice and natural examples of weighted Lie groupoids. For example, the higher order tangent bundle of a Lie groupoid is a weighted Lie groupoid. This and other examples convince us that weighted Lie groupoids are important objects and that there is plenty of work to do.

References
[1] Grabowski J., Rotkiewicz M., Graded bundles and homogeneity structures, J. Geom. Phys. 62 (2012), 21-36, arXiv:1102.0180.

[2] Bursztyn H., Cabrera A., del Hoyo M., Vector bundles over Lie groupoids and algebroids, arXiv:1410.5135.

[3] Bruce A.J., Grabowska K., Grabowski J., Linear duals of graded bundles and higher analogues of (Lie) algebroids, arXiv:1409.0439.

[4] Grabowski J., Rotkiewicz M., Higher vector bundles and multi-graded symplectic manifolds, J. Geom. Phys. 59 (2009), 1285-1305, math.DG/0702772.