A Mind for Madness

Musings on art, philosophy, mathematics, and physics

Classical Local Systems


I lied to you a little. I may not get into the arithmetic stuff quite yet. I’m going to talk about some “classical” things in modern language. In the things I’ve been reading lately, these ideas seem to be implicit in everything said. I can’t find this explained thoroughly anywhere. Eventually I want to understand how monodromy relates to bad reduction in the {p}-adic setting. So we’ll start today with the different viewpoints of a local system in the classical sense that are constantly switched between without ever being explained.

You may need to briefly recall the old posts on connections. The goal for the day is to relate the three equivalent notions of a local system, a vector bundle plus flat connection on it, and a representation of the fundamental group. There may be some inaccuracies in this post, because I can’t really find this written anywhere and I don’t fully understand it (that’s why I’m making this post!).

Since I said we’d work in the “classical” setting, let’s just suppose we have a nice smooth variety over the complex numbers, {X}. In this sense, we can actually think about it as a smooth manifold, or complex analytic space. If you want, you can have the picture of a Riemann surface in your head, since the next post will reduce us to that situation.

Suppose we have a vector bundle on {X}, say {E}, together with a connection {\nabla : E\rightarrow E\otimes \Omega^1}. We’ll fix a basepoint {p\in X} that will always secretly be lurking in the background. Let’s try to relate this this connection to a representation of the fundamental group. Well, if we look at some old posts we’ll recall that a choice of connection is exactly the same data as telling you “parallel transport”. So what this means is that if I have some path on {X} it tells me how a vector in the fiber of the vector bundle moves from the starting point to the ending point.

Remember, that we fixed some basepoint {p} already. So if I take some loop based at {p} say {\sigma}, then a vector {V\in E_p} can be transported around that loop to give me another vector {\sigma(V)\in E_p}. If my vector bundle is rank {n}, then {E_p} is just an {n}-dimensional vector space and I’ve now told you an action of the loop space based at {p} on this vector space.

Visualization of a vector being transported around a loop on a torus (yes, I’m horrible at graphics, and I couldn’t even figure out how to label the other vector at p as \sigma (V)):

This doesn’t quite give me a representation of the fundamental group (based at {p}), since we can’t pass to the quotient, i.e. the transport of the vector around a loop that is homotopic to {0} might be non-trivial. We are saved if we started with a flat connection. It can be checked that the flatness assumption gives a trivial action around nullhomotopic loops. Thus the parallel transport only depends on homotopy classes of loops, and we get a group homomorphism {\pi_1(X, p)\rightarrow GL_n(E_p)}.

Modulo a few details, the above process can essentially be reversed, and hence given a representation you can produce a unique pair {(E,\nabla)}, a vector bundle plus flat connection associated to it. This relates the latter two ideas I started with. The one that gave me the most trouble was how local systems fit into the picture. A local system is just a locally constant sheaf of {n}-dimensional vector spaces. At first it didn’t seem likely that the data of a local system should be equivalent to these other two things, since the sheaf is locally constant. This seems like no data at all to work with rather than an entire vector bundle plus flat connection.

Here is why algebraically there is good motivation to believe this. Recall that one can think of a connection as essentially a generalization of a derivative. It is just something that satisfies the Leibniz rule on sections. Recall that we call a section, {s}, horizontal for the connection if {\nabla (s)=0}. But if this is the derivative, this just means that the section should be constant. In this analogy, we see that if we pick a vector bundle plus flat connection, we can form a local system, namely the horizontal sections (which are the locally constant functions). If you want an exercise to see that the analogy is actually a special case, take the vector bundle to be the globally trivial line bundle {\mathcal{O}_X} and the connection to be the honest exterior derivative {d:\mathcal{O}_X\rightarrow \Omega^1}.

The process can be reversed again, and given any locally constant sheaf of vector spaces, you can cook up a vector bundle and flat connection whose horizontal sections are precisely the sections of the sheaf. Thus our three seemingly different notions are actually all equivalent. I should point out that part of my oversight on the local system side was thinking that a locally constant sheaf somehow doesn’t contain much information. Recall that it is still a sheaf, so we can be associating lots of information on large open sets and we still have restriction homomorphisms giving data as well. Next time we’ll talk about some classical theorems in differential equation theory that are most easily proved and stated in this framework.

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Author: hilbertthm90


2 thoughts on “Classical Local Systems

  1. Hi,

    have you looked at the references here?


    I think Szamuely’s book explained this well.

  2. Thanks! That book looks great.

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