Fiber Bundle - Differentiable Fiber Bundles

Differentiable Fiber Bundles

In the category of differentiable manifolds, fiber bundles arise naturally as submersions of one manifold to another. Not every (differentiable) submersion ƒ : M → N from a differentiable manifold M to another differentiable manifold N gives rise to a differentiable fiber bundle. For one thing, the map must be surjective. However, this necessary condition is not quite sufficient, and there are a variety of sufficient conditions in common use.

If M and N are compact and connected, then any submersion f : M → N gives rise to a fiber bundle in the sense that there is a fiber space F diffeomorphic to each of the fibers such that (E,B,π,F) = (M,N,ƒ,F) is a fiber bundle. (Surjectivity of ƒ follows by the assumptions already given in this case.) More generally, the assumption of compactness can be relaxed if the submersion ƒ : M → N is assumed to be a surjective proper map, meaning that ƒ−1(K) is compact for every compact subset K of N. Another sufficient condition, due to Ehresmann (1951), is that if ƒ : M → N is a surjective submersion with M and N differentiable manifolds such that the preimage ƒ−1{x} is compact and connected for all x ∈ N, then ƒ admits a compatible fiber bundle structure (Michor 2008, §17).